Finance built a PTO approval app

“We'll add tests later.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Officially because management has a PowerPoint with a third number. Quietly rolled out to five countries.

Built by:

Thomas, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

1 hours 5 minutes

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

a Postgres database called test-backup-really-final containing 4 years of production data

Authentication:

SSO, but only for Priya

Deployment:

deployed behind a Cloudflare Tunnel from Lukas's laptop

Responsible:

Anja, who only knows the frontend

Documentation:

a Loom video recorded at 1.5x speed

Security situation:

a security review was scheduled for June and quietly cancelled

Future disaster:

It will cause Security to ask "what application?".

Age: 6.2 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 102 users, alive 75x longer than intended, older than the department using it.