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When a merged PR results in a bug

This page describes the process to follow when someone notices a mistake in a merged pull request (PR).

  1. A contributor (either staff or community member) submits a PR, it is reviewed and merged into the codebase.
  2. Sometime later, the community notices a mistake with the PR.

Question is, what should we, as a community, do? That depends on the scope of the changes in the PR that was merged.

Low impact issues 

A low impact PR might mean that it affected:

  • Some non-critical functionality.
  • It doesn’t affect users in a substantial way.

If this is the case, do the following:

  1. Capture details in an issue.
  2. Mark it according to its priority.
  3. Would be best to assign it to the person who introduced the issue in the first place.

High impact issues 

A high impact PR represents something that has or will result in a customer incident.

If this is the case, there are two scenarios:

  1. The feature introduced in the PR is handled by a feature flag.
  2. The feature introduced in the PR is not handled by a feature flag.

For scenario 1, if it’s not affecting other functionality, turn that feature flag off to disable the feature.

For scenario 2:

  1. Revert the changes introduced in the original PR.
  2. Notify the person who worked on the PR know so they can work on a proper fix for their PR.
  3. Reintroduce the change through the regular PR cycle.

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