I run into this post, in which the author describe how they got ERROR 1000294 from IBM DataPower Gateway as part of an integration effort. The underlying issue was that he sent JSON to the endpoint in an order that it wasn’t expected.

After asking the team at the other end to fix it, the author got back an estimation of effort for 9 people for 6 months (4.5 man years!). The author then went and figured out that the fix for the error was somewhere deep inside DataPower:

Validate order of JSON? [X]

The author then proceeded to question the competency  / moral integrity of the estimation.

I believe that the author was grossly unfair, at best, to the people doing the estimation. Mostly because he assumed that unchecking the box and running a single request is a sufficient level of testing for this kind of change. But also because it appears that the author never considered once what is the reason this setting may be in place.

• The sort order of JSON has been responsible for Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities.
• The code processing the JSON may not do that in a streaming fashion, and therefor expect the data in a particular order.
• Worse, the code may just assume the order of the fields and access them by index. Change the order of the fields, and you may reverse the Creditor and Debtor fields.
• The code may translate the JSON to another format and send it over to another system (likely, given the mentioned legacy system.

The setting is there to protect the system, and unchecking that value means that you have to check every single one of the integration points (which may be several layers deep) to ensure that there isn’t explicit or implied ordering to the JSON.

In short, given the scope and size of the change:  “Fundamentally alter how we accept data from the outside world”, I can absolutely see why they gave this number.

And yes, for 99% of the cases, there isn’t likely to be any different, but you need to validate for that nasty 1% scenario.