Digital Transformation built a lead assignment app

“We'll document it after the quarter.”— Marco, Digital Transformation

Reason:

Mainly because the architecture diagram contains a box labelled "manual step". Forked from a tutorial at 14:00 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Marco, someone from Procurement

Build time:

4 evenings

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

a SQLite file on a network share

Authentication:

the service account has global admin, just in case

Deployment:

deployed from Thomas's laptop

Responsible:

Sofia, because everyone else refused

Documentation:

an onboarding call everyone is expected to remember

Security situation:

the privacy policy refers to a different application

Future disaster:

It will silently skip 6% of records.

Age: 6.0 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 5 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 104 users, 29% chance of becoming business critical, alive 37x longer than intended.