During convergence, Henri sent out a graph every morning to everyone on the Purple software team, where he plotted Radar bugs against dates, with the release date at the right end of the x-axis. Over time, the meanderings of the daily bug counts drew a squiggly line: More bugs made the line go up, fewer made it go down. We got good at reading this convergence line and taking the temperature of the project through it. We learned to understand convergence behaviors, like the upward spikes in the line after big demos, which weren’t as worrisome as they seemed—many demo bugs would be quick and
...more
