Facilities built a wrapper around a wrapper around SAP

“The AI understands the code.”— Marco, Facilities

Reason:

Because the form takes 21 minutes to complete and times out after 14. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Marco, a field technician

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Postgres, but accessed directly from the frontend

Database:

a backup drive that has not been plugged in for 16 months

Authentication:

the certificate is self-signed and everybody clicked through

Deployment:

running in Kubernetes with one pod and no reason

Responsible:

Katrin, because their credit card pays for it

Documentation:

an architecture diagram with 5 arrows labelled API

Security situation:

IT was informed. IT has chosen peace.

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by an Excel file during the migration.

Age: 7.9 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: €2.5m per year, 96% chance of becoming business critical, 268 users.