Facilities built a warehouse label printer web app

“There's already a Confluence page.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Officially because the lunch prototype is now business critical. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Marco, a product owner

Build time:

1 hours 29 minutes

Built with:

React, Vite and enthusiasm

Database:

filenames. The filenames are the database.

Authentication:

there is one account called "user"

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Wednesday, no staging

Responsible:

Sofia, who only knows the database

Documentation:

a file called how-it-works-v2-final-final.docx

Security situation:

it has an admin panel, unlinked, unprotected

Future disaster:

It will fail exactly when Bastian is on holiday.

Age: 2.8 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 170 users, 60% chance of becoming business critical, alive 17x longer than intended.