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LaunchDebuggingLeadershipPressureMagic Leap

Pre-Launch Crunch: Debugging Under Pressure

The final push before device launch - triaging bugs, making hard cuts, and keeping the team functional under extreme pressure.

Evyatar Bluzer
2 min read

Launch is next month. We have more bugs than we can fix. The question isn't what to fix, but what to ship broken.

The Bug Triage Framework

Every bug gets classified:

Ship blocker: Cannot launch with this bug

  • Safety issues
  • Data loss
  • Crashes >1% of sessions
  • Core functionality broken

Launch quality: Should fix before launch

  • Poor user experience
  • Performance below target
  • Features partially working

Known issue: Document and fix post-launch

  • Edge cases
  • Cosmetic issues
  • Features that degrade gracefully

The discipline: only ship blockers block the ship.

Our Current State

Perception bugs in triage:

  • 3 ship blockers: tracking loss in specific lighting, depth sensor timeout, eye tracking crash
  • 12 launch quality: various accuracy and performance issues
  • 47 known issues: edge cases accumulated over months

We have 4 weeks. Assuming 1 engineer-week per ship blocker on average, and some blockers will spawn new blockers during fix, we're cutting it close.

Debugging Strategy

War Room

Physical (and virtual) space where:

  • All sensor data from failing devices is accessible
  • Experts from each subsystem are co-located
  • Decision-making authority is present

No waiting for meetings or email chains.

Hypothesis-Driven Debugging

For each blocker:

  1. Reproduce reliably
  2. Form hypothesis about root cause
  3. Design experiment to test hypothesis
  4. Execute and analyze
  5. If hypothesis confirmed, fix. If not, return to step 2.

Avoid shotgun debugging (change random things and hope).

Failure Taxonomy

We're categorizing every failure:

  • Where did it manifest? (SLAM, depth, eye tracking)
  • What triggered it? (lighting, motion, user action)
  • Why did it happen? (sensor issue, algorithm bug, integration error)

Patterns emerge. Three "different" bugs might share a root cause.

Hard Cuts

Features we're cutting:

  • Hand tracking gesture recognition (basic tracking stays, gestures don't)
  • Outdoor SLAM (indoor-only for launch)
  • Eye tracking analytics (tracking works, metrics don't)

Painful, but shipping something great is better than shipping everything mediocre.

Team Health

Extended crunch is unsustainable. Managing:

  • Mandatory time off after each ship-blocker fix
  • Visible appreciation for heroic efforts
  • Permission to escalate blockers that shouldn't be
  • Protecting people from unreasonable asks

The launch will happen. The team needs to be intact afterward.

One month to go.

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