EULA bugs

Time was, most days you’d get an installer to test. Sometimes even two or three installers in a single day. And you had to run those installers on lots of lab machines. Which means, over time you clicked a lot of Install buttons.

The very first thing every installer did was brandish its End User License Agreement to the customer, which was a company’s carefully-written, bacon-saving liturgy. Whereupon you had to click the checkbox or radio button to indicate that, yes, you had indeed just read and digested the entire document and determined it to be not only satisfactory but also legally binding.

One day at the big security vendor for which you were working, it occurs to you that there could be bugs hiding in that EULA — that is, in the text itself. It being your job to find bugs, you start reading the thing. Well, skimming really. But you’re at least running your eyes over the sentences.

Which is when you notice that the postal address for customer service in the European Union is munged, along with some of the surrounding text. So you file a bug report, which wends its way through the Legal department and eventually emerges some days later along with a new installer sporting a regulation EULA which contains the correct address. As it turns out, it had been a copy & paste error by someone in between the lawyers and the person who built the installer.

Some time later, your department’s test plans are changed to incorporate diffing the installer EULA against the one blessed by Legal.

Lessons:

1. Bugs are hiding anywhere that people don’t look.

2. Never assume that business-critical issues belong to someone above your pay grade — like someone in, say, the Legal department.

3. It’s safest when responsibility for deliverables is shared. Either you have overlaps, or gaps. Your choice.