- enter P as password
  - enter H as hint
  - click “OK”
  - unmount the disk
  - mount it again
  - check that the dialog shows the hint H
  - enter P as the password
  ...

To me, it seems at least as likely that that gets past a tester once as it is that a programmer writes that bug.

It still should be highly unlikely to get throug multiple rounds of testing by multiple testers, though.

A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.

Maybe I expect too much, but a tester with any experience is going to use strings like "thePassword" and "theHint" to reduce those brain farts. One doesn't have to test software very long before discovering why using "test", "test" as the respective strings for that dialog will bite you.

I agree with your hypothesis, but it's one of those mistakes I'd expect out of a fresh-out-of-college person, and I would expect those folks to be testing, say, TextEdit and not security-sensitive pieces. But there are so many unknowns that I still reserve judgement. I'd just like to know what piece of the process broke down such that something like this gets out the door.

Thinking of that, this may be an example of a copy-paste bug (https://www.viva64.com/en/a/0068/), where the programmer wrote

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &password);

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &passwordhint);