Dog Shelter Team built a CRM pretending to be an ERP

“It's only metadata.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Mainly because the project has been 90% finished for 17 months. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Anja, someone from Procurement

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

three AI coding tools arguing through the same repository

Database:

a Raspberry Pi with 3 years of production data

Authentication:

permissions are managed by copying another user's account

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

a vendor whose support contract expired 3 months ago

Documentation:

a Word document called copy of copy of Stock_list_backup_final_FINAL.xlsx

Security situation:

the service account is also a real employee

Future disaster:

It will get backups after the first data loss.

Age: 359 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 74% chance of becoming business critical, alive 51x longer than intended, 1 accidental connections.