[kogir]

I can't speak to anything about u-Deals since I didn't work on it, but the SMS issue was actually a bug. The guy who wrote the invitation flow forgot to clear a collection during initialization of the screen. If the user invited one contact at a time, each subsequent invitation would send another invitation to everyone the user had already invited. Within 30 minutes of hearing of the bug I had updated the Loopt server code to drop all SMS invitations from that build.

There were no instances of invitations being sent to people that weren't marked as selected or who the user hadn't already invited. Ever. It's too late for anyone to download that version and verify my claims, but it's true.

There was no rational reason for the behavior the app exhibited. Does pissing off the contacts of all of your users lead to success? No way. Was the SMS issue a fuck-up? Absolutely. Was it a bug? Yes. Was it malevolent? No.

If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.

[ZoFreX]

> If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.

Surely at the point it's pissing off your users (which has a financial implication too), you're moving too fast?

Personally I don't like the idea of missing basic things, and from your description that really sounds like a bug that should have been caught - but that might just be a brief summary. Can you recall how frequently the bug manifested, or any reason it wasn't caught in testing?

[kogir]

The invitation UI showed a list of all your contacts, and let you select which ones to invite. It was pretty clear you could invite more than one person at a time, so our testing never caught going to the screen multiple times in one app run to invite multiple people.

Also, the person sending the invitations didn't see the bad behavior. On the receiving end, when I got multiple SMSs, how was I to know if QA invited me once or multiple times?

We did change our SMS testing process after that though, and haven't had any more similar incidents to date.

You can't catch everything or you never release. It wasn't an obvious bug until we heard about the behavior users were seeing. Sometimes the things you miss have a small impact. Other times they're a bigger deal.