The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users?
It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.
Fixing the space issue will help more people than it hurts. People that have spaces at the beginning or end of their password can simply reset their password or call customer support. Users forget or mistype passwords all the time.
There's a huge swath of the industry where it doesn't make sense to release any faster than a few times a year. Think Office applications, RDBMS products, email servers, accounting apps, etc, etc. Even the fastest cadence apps (like browsers) are on more of a 6-week cycle. The web is unique in that every visit is an opportunity to deliver new code, but there's way to much friction with most application types to do that.
All methodologies have the goal of working software. Where they differ is in how they try to get there.
Agile came about because people started saying "hey, this process we have for creating working software isn't actually creating working software. Maybe we should try another process."
Software is a hell of a lot easier to write and test if you have a decent well thought out set or requirements. Getting that is far harder than any coding.
It's sort of like religion. The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The amount of Christian religions that actually care about what's written in the Book is minuscule.
The closest thing actually within Christianity to this is a relatively new idea ("new" in the context of how long Christianity has existed) particular to a subset of Protestant Christianity, and generally rejected by the rest of Christianity, to wit, the doctrine of sola scriptura. [0]
That reminds me of a bug I found during my first internship. The company had it's own niche social network centered around it's main product. On it, you were able to change your display name at any time, and if you added any spaces to the beginning or end of your username, you could hijack another users profile. That is, I could change my username to " snarfy", and if you clicked my display name to go to my profile, it would actually go to yours. A malicious user could use this to make inflammatory posts posing as a high profile user.
The bug was that the display name was first checked to see if it already existed before white space was stripped. Luckily this was fixed very quickly after it was found, as it existed in production.
It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.