Marketing built a customer health score with a formula in a comment

“It's on a weird port.”— Thomas, Marketing

Reason:

Because the workflow has 46 steps and nobody wants to open it. Quietly rolled out to two countries.

Built by:

Thomas, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

27 minutes

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a YAML file with 226,455 customer records

Authentication:

one shared password, written on a sticky note in the meeting room

Deployment:

running on a laptop with 27% battery

Responsible:

"the team", which is Thomas

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

the penetration test found it by accident

Future disaster:

It will cause Legal to ask "who approved this?".

Age: 81 days · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 1 users, €470 per year, alive 1x longer than intended.