The Reporting Team built a meeting room temperature complaint tracker

“We have a diagram.”— Sarah, The Reporting Team

Reason:

Allegedly because the source of truth depends on which department you ask. Quietly rolled out to two countries.

Built by:

Sarah, an analyst

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

browser cookies with surprising ambition

Authentication:

authorization is handled in the UI

Deployment:

kept alive by a scheduled task every 9 minutes

Responsible:

Tobias, until somebody notices

Documentation:

a folder called Documentation containing another folder called Old

Security situation:

the security exception expires every year and is renewed every year

Future disaster:

It will get rewritten, producing exactly the same system.

Age: 2.4 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 4 owners so far · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 392 days ago

Rated common mostly because: the builder has left, alive 10x longer than intended, 2 users.