Legal built a tool checkout system

“We'll document it after the quarter.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Mainly because the workflow has 66 steps and nobody wants to open it. Already exported 31,520 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Miriam, a recruiter

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a browser extension that somehow became business critical

Database:

a column called misc2 because misc was already taken

Authentication:

the security model is "we have antivirus"

Deployment:

deployed on Tuesday immediately before a public holiday

Responsible:

Lukas, who is currently interviewing elsewhere

Documentation:

an Excel tab called Instructions

Security situation:

the JWT secret is "changeme"

Future disaster:

It will cause Procurement to ask "what vendor?".

Age: 2.8 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 4 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago · original builder left 559 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 201 users, €162k per year, alive 48x longer than intended.