👉 The Bug Period

There was a period where every fix seemed to produce two new problems, and I started to wonder if we'd made something that couldn't be finished.

I'm not going to give you a number. The number isn't the point and I'd probably get it wrong. The point is the feeling. You wake up, you look at the list, you fix the thing at the top with real satisfaction, and by the evening the list is longer than when you started.

What made it worse was that a lot of them weren't classic bugs. Classic bugs are almost restful. Something crashes, you read the error, you fix it. Ours were mostly the other kind: everything technically worked and the result was still wrong. The user asked for one thing and got a defensible, reasonable, completely unhelpful interpretation of it. There's no stack trace for that.

The thing that got us through it was boring, and I'd do it again. We stopped treating them as individual bugs. Every time something went wrong we asked what class of problem it belonged to, and we tried to fix the class. Slower for any single issue. Much faster over a month.

The other thing that helped, honestly, was that the people testing it stayed. They kept sending us the failures. When someone bothers to tell you your product broke, they still want you to fix it. Those are the ones worth keeping.

I wonder, what did you do in the stretch where progress stopped feeling like progress?