Procurement built a barcode scanner that only works on one phone

“The admin page isn't linked anywhere.”— Marco, Procurement

Reason:

Officially because the licence costs €8,600 per named user. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Marco, a team lead

Build time:

43 minutes

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

Trello cards with JSON in the descriptions

Authentication:

Google sign-in, any Google account

Deployment:

behind a domain that still contains the word test

Responsible:

an intern's old manager's manager

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

security is handled by the fact nobody knows it exists

Future disaster:

It will process the same invoice 2 times.

Age: 2.1 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 749 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 179 users, €79k per year, 3 departments depend on it.