I once worked on making a progress bar for a process that had a known number of tasks. Unfortunately not all tasks would take the same amount of time, and it wa

I once worked on making a progress bar for a process that had a known number of tasks. Unfortunately not all tasks would take the same amount of time, and it was impossible to know the relative amount of time each task would take beforehand. I did the logical thing, and had the progress bar advance 1/nth every time a task completed, with an animation to make it less jarring. A few weeks later, the product manager came to me and told me I needed to make it so the progress bar kept slowly moving up if no tasks were completed for a certain amount of time, so the user would know that work was still being done. Fine. But what happens if the task takes so long that it goes past the mark for the next completed task? Well, when the task is actually completed, it moves backwards of course.