Quality Assurance built a contract deadline reminder bot

“It's not shadow IT if the manager knows about it.”— Nadia, Quality Assurance

Reason:

Because someone called it "basically just CRUD". With a logo generated at 16:03.

Built by:

Nadia, a product owner

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

MongoDB where every document has a different schema

Authentication:

the encryption key is stored next to the encrypted data

Deployment:

on a free tier that expires in 8 days

Responsible:

"the team", which is Nadia

Documentation:

a Word document called Invoices_Q3.csv

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will get a support rota before it gets an owner.

Age: 2.2 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 3 owners so far · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 99% chance of becoming business critical, 2 accidental connections, 23 users.