Hotfix & Jira Integration - Best Practices

Hotfix & Jira Integration – Best Practices for High-Performance Engineering Organizations

To ensure high-quality insights into engineering health, we rely on clean and consistent metadata across GitHub and Jira. This document outlines best practices for accurately identifying hotfixes and enabling accurate metrics, such as MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) and CFR (Change Failure Rate). Following these practices will ensure your team’s work is properly tracked and reflected in engineering reports.

1. Identify Hotfixes via Pull Request Patterns

We detect hotfix PRs by scanning Git metadata for specific keywords across several fields. This is the primary method for classifying a PR as a hotfix.

Recommended Keywords (These can be configured based on your naming convention) :

• hotfix

• hot fix

Fields Scanned:

• Label

• Title

• Description

• Branch Name

• Tag

🔍 Examples:

• hotfix/fix-auth-bug (branch)

• 
• Hotfix: Resolve checkout crash (title)

• PR label: hotfix

• Tag: v2.1.4-hotfix

• Commit Message:

• The title, description can contain other task level details as well, it doesn’t have to be ONLY the ticket ID For example in the below screenshot “HAT-816” is the jira ticket ID

2. Use Semantic Versioning for Patch Releases

Hotfixes can also be identified using version numbers that follow the semantic versioning format: x.y.z, where z (the patch number) is greater than 0.

This method is optional and must be explicitly enabled.

Example:

• PR title: Release v1.3.2

• Branch: release/v1.3.2

• Tag: v1.3.2

3. Jira Issue Types – Use Consistent Classification

To link hotfix PRs with Jira issues, we rely on standard Jira issue types.

Required Setup:

• Hotfix-related tickets must use the Bug issue type.

• Ensure Jira issue types are configured consistently across teams.

4. What to Avoid

The following practices prevent us from generating reliable Jira-linked metrics:

• Using shared or generic Jira accounts

• Assigning issues via custom filters (e.g., using individual developers as an assignee type)

• Inconsistent or missing PR metadata (no hotfix keyword, no version tags, etc.)

• Not using or misusing Jira issue types (e.g. all issues marked as “Task”)

Why This Matters

When these best practices are followed, you unlock the ability to track and improve:

• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

• Change Failure Rate (CFR)

• PR-to-Jira traceability

• Team- and user-level accountability metrics