Three People From Finance built a reconciliation tool for two systems that should agree

“It's internal.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Officially because Kevin from Three People From Finance is on holiday until April. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Elena, a recruiter

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a no-code builder on someone's personal account

Database:

a production table where the primary key is the customer's name

Authentication:

the password is stored in a Teams channel called "Passwords"

Deployment:

kept alive by a scheduled task every 5 minutes

Responsible:

nobody. It has no owner.

Documentation:

a 52 minute screen recording

Security situation:

the admin page is protected by not linking to it

Future disaster:

It will still be running in 2033.

Age: 6.7 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 4 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 295 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: alive 349x longer than intended, 2 accidental connections, €55k per year.