Engineering Emergency Changes

Emergency review is for rare cases where speed of the entire change matters more than normal review depth. It does not mean "skip engineering judgment"; it means narrow the change, verify the emergency, prioritize correctness, and schedule follow-up review.

Adapted from Google Engineering Practices Documentation, especially "Emergencies" and the reviewer speed guidance. Source: https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/emergencies.html. License: CC-BY 3.0.

Emergency Gate

Treat a change as an emergency only when it is a small targeted change and at least one condition is true:

• It prevents a major launch from failing when rollback is not the right option.
• It fixes a bug that is significantly affecting production users.
• It addresses a pressing legal or compliance issue.
• It closes a major security vulnerability.
• It satisfies a hard external deadline where missing it would cause contractual, legal, security, production-user, or clearly disastrous launch harm.

These are usually not emergencies by themselves: