HR built a webinar registration dashboard

“It's not customer-facing.”— Priya, HR

Reason:

Allegedly because the customer asked for one tiny change. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Priya, a product owner

Build time:

9 evenings

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

a database dump from February that is "probably current enough"

Authentication:

the password manager is someone's browser

Deployment:

running behind nginx config copied from Stack Overflow

Responsible:

a shared mailbox nobody reads

Documentation:

an email with the subject "quick overview"

Security situation:

the incident response plan starts with "call Jens"

Future disaster:

It will become the source of truth in 10 months.

Age: 78 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 78 days ago · original builder left 43 days ago

Rated common mostly because: nobody owns it, the builder has left, 9 users.