Resolving critical issues
This document describes the VA.gov Platform policy for handling critical issues in main branches, regardless of whether that issue has reached production.
We intend to keep our repositories always deployable from main branches. VA.gov does not use release branches; instead, we maintain a focus on keeping the main branches healthy. This means that problematic code in main branches should be resolved as quickly as possible.
Is my issue critical?
See "Is my issue critical?" to determine when these guidelines apply.
Fix forward, or revert?
When an issue in a main branch is discovered, the following decision tree should be used in resolving it:
Default to reverting the PR that caused the problem.
Five minutes: Can the bug be fixed in a change under five minutes? Go for it. If not, revert the offending PR.
One try: if fixing forward was already attempted and other issues were discovered in the process, revert all involved PRs.
Requesting a new release
See Deployment Policies for process on initiating a new production release from the given main branch.
Binary rollbacks (deploying previously-deployed versions) are not used, due to risks around database migrations and risks around frontend-backend dependencies. Any exceptions to this rule should absolutely ensure that database migrations are not involved in the affected range of commits.
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.