Bug Bashing Party at Figma During Quality Week | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma’s Quality Week is a company-wide pause from new feature development to focus on fixing accumulated bugs and polishing existing functionality. The initiative reflects Figma’s belief that small usability problems compound for designers who spend hours in the product. By making quality work a recurring tradition, Figma aims to deliver a smoother, more reliable professional tool while also giving employees opportunities to explore unfamiliar parts of the codebase.
A Company-Wide Focus on Quality
- Figma launched its first official Quality Week in early 2017.
- Engineers and designers temporarily paused their regular projects to address:
- Annoying but non-critical bugs
- Broken or incomplete features
- Improvements to existing workflows
- The company found that focused maintenance work could be as valuable as continuously shipping new features.
- Quality improvements are especially important because users spend long periods working in Figma, making small imperfections increasingly disruptive.
Quality Week 2018 Improvements
- Two engineering teams collaborated on a broad set of bugs and prioritized issues that affected Figma’s professional quality.
- Notable fixes included:
- Figma Mirror: Improved stability and reduced crashes in the mobile mirroring app.
- Sketch import: Added drag-and-drop importing into the editor and improved text-import accuracy.
- Chromebook support: Enabled users to hold the search key and drag to duplicate objects.
- Layer panel behavior: Made it easier and more intuitive to nest layers into groups and frames.
- Figma acknowledged that the product was not bug-free, but planned to continue focused quality efforts throughout the year.
Benefits for the Team
- Quality Week helped developers and designers work in parts of the codebase outside their usual areas.
- The event encouraged collaboration across teams and made otherwise routine maintenance work enjoyable.
- Figma celebrated achievements with awards, including recognition for fixing the company’s oldest known bug—an issue affecting Windows users since 2015.
Feedback and Ongoing Support
- Many bugs addressed during Quality Week were reported by Figma’s user community.
- Figma encouraged users to submit feedback through:
- The in-product Help menu
- The community forum
- Email support
- The company emphasized an all-hands support model, where users might interact with engineers or even the CEO.
Figma’s approach shows that dedicated time for bug fixing and product cleanup can complement innovation rather than compete with it. Regular quality-focused periods, combined with continuous user feedback, help maintain a reliable and polished product as it evolves.