Quality Assurance built a second CRM

“We'll add SSO later.”— Marco, Quality Assurance

Reason:

Mainly because the spreadsheet has 16,032 rows and 49 tabs. Started as Invoices_Q3_FIXED.xlsx with a script attached.

Built by:

Marco, a working student

Build time:

4 evenings

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins

Database:

a GitHub Gist that became business critical

Authentication:

"auth is on the roadmap" — has been for 88 days

Deployment:

running on port 9000 in production

Responsible:

Bastian, until somebody notices

Documentation:

a Slack thread from October

Security situation:

production secrets are in a Jira ticket

Future disaster:

It will cause Finance Business Partner to request an immediate status meeting.

Age: 86 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 74 days ago · original builder left 82 days ago

Rated common mostly because: the builder has left, 1 accidental connections, alive 3x longer than intended.