HR built a purchase order status tracker

“It's just an Excel replacement.”— Tobias, HR

Reason:

Allegedly because the ticket has been open for 141 days. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Tobias, the management assistant

Build time:

19 minutes

Built with:

a serverless architecture with one very stateful function

Database:

three databases, each claiming to be the source of truth

Authentication:

the audit log records "something changed"

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Thursday, no staging

Responsible:

Tobias, who left 15 months ago

Documentation:

a README that begins with "temporary notes"

Security situation:

security is handled by being behind the office Wi-Fi

Future disaster:

It will process the same invoice 4 times.

Age: 6.1 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 1251 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 123 users, alive 74x longer than intended, the builder has left.