Hotfixes are patches that are applied to critical bugs – these are mainly showstopping issues that are found in the master branch. In these cases, you make a branch from the master directly and usually prefix the branch name with hofix-, then make the fix on a new commit and merge back into master, tagging the master release with a new version (usually a minor or patch version, depending on your versioning strategy). After you've merged into master, you also need to merge this into develop so that develop has the latest patches and fixes and you don't conflict in future releases. The hotfix can then be safely deleted as it is no longer required:
Hotfixes
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