Fix Forward

An approach to handling production bugs where the team accepts that defects will reach users and prioritises rapid patching over prevention. Rather than treating every production incident as a process failure, fix forward treats speed of resolution as the primary quality lever. Teams that fix forward invest in fast deployment pipelines, hotfix processes, and monitoring so that when something breaks, it can be corrected quickly. The approach is common in startups where release cadence is high and rollback is costly or slow. 

For example: shipping a hotfix within hours of a production bug being reported rather than holding the next release; or prioritising observability tooling so defects are caught and resolved before most users notice them.