An intern built a meeting room booking system

“We'll add SSO later.”— Finance Business Partner

Reason:

Allegedly because the workflow has 104 steps and nobody wants to open it. With a logo generated at 09:15.

Built by:

Chen, a team lead

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

an FTP server containing folders called NEW, NEW2 and FINAL

Authentication:

the encryption key is in the source code

Deployment:

hosted on the demo environment, permanently

Responsible:

whoever happens to be on call

Documentation:

a Word document with tracked changes still enabled

Security situation:

passwords are "encrypted" with Base64

Future disaster:

It will survive the official replacement system.

Age: 4.7 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 5 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 224 users, alive 246x longer than intended, 18% chance of becoming business critical.