A Former Employee built a PTO approval app

“It's only 800 lines.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Honestly? Because the vendor quoted €8,600 and a discovery phase. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Anja, a working student

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

an Access database called Leads_backup.xlsm with 16 linked tables

Authentication:

the write-only account can also read

Deployment:

deployed Friday at 17:57

Responsible:

Katrin, because they clicked "create project" first

Documentation:

a README describing a version that no longer exists

Security situation:

every error response includes the full stack trace

Future disaster:

It will cause Finance to ask "what is this charge?".

Age: 146 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 146 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 315 users, €40k per year, 23% chance of becoming business critical.