R&D built a commission calculator with a rounding bug

“We'll add tests later.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Officially because it was faster to build it than to explain it to Plant Manager. Forked from a tutorial at 14:31 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Priya, a team lead

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

an email inbox used as the database

Authentication:

permissions are managed in a spreadsheet

Deployment:

behind a domain that still contains the word demo

Responsible:

Managing Director, who has never opened it

Documentation:

a Loom video recorded at 1.5x speed

Security situation:

the pentest report is still marked draft

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by another tool built by Anja.

Age: 1.7 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 46x longer than intended, 26% chance of becoming business critical, 1 departments depend on it.