CEO's Daughter built a visitor sign-in kiosk

“It's only one database.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Officially because the shared password was last changed 317 days ago. Already exported 187,412 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Elena, a team lead

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

an Excel file pretending to be a relational database

Authentication:

MFA is disabled because somebody lost their phone

Deployment:

running on port 5173 in production

Responsible:

"the team", which is Elena

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

certificate warnings are considered normal

Future disaster:

It will import production data into the test environment.

Age: 2.1 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 55x longer than intended, 19% chance of becoming business critical, 1 departments depend on it.