Quality Assurance built a performance review form

“The code is self-documenting.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Officially because the official form has 55 fields and not the one that matters. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Sofia, a working student

Build time:

3 evenings

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

an email inbox used as the database

Authentication:

the logout button is on the roadmap

Deployment:

running on an EC2 instance somebody resized manually

Responsible:

Katrin, who is currently interviewing elsewhere

Documentation:

three different architecture diagrams

Security situation:

the penetration test found it by accident

Future disaster:

It will be discovered during due diligence.

Age: 2.9 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated mythic mostly because: 490 users, 100% chance of becoming business critical, 5 departments depend on it.