What do you call a modification that is made on a Environment that is not DEV?

Question

In application life-cycle management, it's common to have some environments. For example:

DEV -> Staging -> Production

Normally, you would develop in the DEV environment and stage your developments to Staging and Production.

But it's possible to directly modify the PRD environment (to quickly fix a bug, for instance). How do you call this procedure (the modification of your code in an environment that is not the DEV environment)?

I thought it was called "hotfix" but I see no related search results in Google.

Answer 1

As opposed to your reference entity Environment the entity is, in my opinion, Branch within your SCM.

With this in mind, you are absolutely right: In my experience it was always a Hotfix branch.
For planet TFS where I currently reside, this is described in various branching guidelines including this one - which is considered to be among the best (if not THE best).
I had similar experiences in a UNIX/ClearCase planet, again with Hotfix branches - they were named as "MaintenanceRelease"-branches. Those contained one or more Hotfixes, occasionally a highly anticipated Feature could be merged into that as well.

I wouldn't ever expect to see in any company a "Hotfix"- Environment. 'Hotfixes' address any possible crisis that a customer has experienced and that is per definition pretty vague. So having such an environment, is possibly a Utopia.
In one occasion, they had a "BLS" - lab ("Back Level Support") which was used by Support-People to reproduce customer scenarios. Hotfixes provided by Development were deployed in this Lab before release. This is in some extend a "Hotfix" environment - still, beware that this installation costed millions.