Records Management built an incident log nobody logs incidents in

“It's more of a tool.”— Sarah, Records Management

Reason:

Because the spreadsheet has 70,635 rows and 91 tabs. Started as Suppliers_new2.csv with a script attached.

Built by:

Sarah, the management assistant

Build time:

4 hours 51 minutes

Built with:

a serverless architecture with one very stateful function

Database:

a mini PC behind the reception desk

Authentication:

Sarah knows the password

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

Finance, according to IT

Documentation:

comments in the code explaining what the code used to do

Security situation:

production secrets are in .env.example

Future disaster:

It will duplicate every record after a timezone change.

Age: 9.0 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 54 users, 32% chance of becoming business critical, alive 55x longer than intended.