I once worked with a product which had an odd installer. The progress bar went straight to 100% very early on, but the installer then continued to install yet more stuff.
By that I mean it was actually putting out messages telling you which files it was copying, or that it was updating the registry and so forth - despite the progress bar clearly being at 100%. It could happily go on for another minute or two, maybe longer if certain options were picked, and the progress bar was evidently completely divorced from the reality of the installation process.
I got to speak to the developers of the product (about something else), and offhandedly asked them about this.
"Oh, that's because the installer script only ever gets appended to. A decade ago, we just had the main module and a couple of optional ones. Now, we have loads more optional modules, and a number of new mandatory ones. Each new module was simply added to the end of the install script - nobody ever goes back to adjust the progress bar computations, because the risk of breaking something when editing the old script entries is high and the benefit is low. As a server based product, very few people see the installer anyway, so we're just never going to fix that."
Well, kudos for them for not taking risks, I suppose...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
