Chapter 16. Managing Hotfixes and Service Packs

Philosophy: When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful...

Edward J. Smith, 1907, Captain of the Titanic (sunk in 1912)

Captain Smith was planning to retire after the maiden voyage of Titanic.

When companies or groups start producing hotfixes or service packs for their released products, it is usually a rude awakening of how good or bad their build processes are. If they have a solid build/release process, creating hotfixes or service packs is rather painless. Conversely, if they do not have good processes in place, this is exposed in a painful way. The good news is that, the majority of the time, the hotfix or service pack problems can be fixed by straightening or flattening your source trees. In Chapter 2, "Source Tree Configuration for Multiple Sites and Parallel (Multi-Version) Development Work," I talk about setting up a golden tree and Virtual Build Labs (VBLs). The example I give in this chapter builds on that concept with details on how to branch, label, and configure the source trees.

Mark Arend, a senior consultant at Microsoft and colleague of mine, has written most of this chapter with great graphics about release management. This best describes how any group or company should organize their release management or sustained engineering efforts. If you use VSS, you should follow these recommendations religiously. If you do not use Visual SourceSafe (VSS), you should still follow these recommendations; just substitute the specific VSS commands with the equivalent commands in your source code control (SCC) tool.