Quality Assurance built a commission calculator with a rounding bug

“It's behind the VPN.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Allegedly because Miriam has the only working copy of Suppliers_FIXED.csv. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Miriam, a field technician

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Vue, for personal reasons

Database:

an FTP server containing folders called NEW, NEW2 and FINAL

Authentication:

the user ID is a query parameter

Deployment:

running in a region 8 time zones away from its users

Responsible:

the business

Documentation:

a Slack message saying "I'll document this later"

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will be migrated into the official system in 2029.

Age: 4.6 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 239x longer than intended, 40% chance of becoming business critical, €64k per year.