Finance built a commission calculator with a rounding bug

“It's not really an application.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Because someone said "just add AI". Already exported 176,201 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Kevin, a product owner

Build time:

8 minutes

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

a table called temp that has existed for 1 years

Authentication:

the production token is in Slack

Deployment:

deployed every time Lukas remembers

Responsible:

a contractor invoicing €1255/day through a third party

Documentation:

a Confluence page owned by Jens, who left

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will discover there are no backups.

Age: 2.1 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 458 users, €173k per year, alive 26x longer than intended.