Legal built a churn predictor trained on 40 rows

“Everyone using it is trustworthy.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Honestly? Because the vendor said it could be ready in Q4, assuming requirements do not change. Already exported 182,173 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Kevin, a key account manager

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Vue, for personal reasons

Database:

a column called misc2 because misc was already taken

Authentication:

permissions are managed in a spreadsheet

Deployment:

running with 83% memory usage and "seems fine"

Responsible:

Miriam, because they clicked "create project" first

Documentation:

comments beginning with TODO 2022

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will silently skip 3% of records.

Age: 8.1 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 4 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 99x longer than intended, €29k per year, older than the department using it.