CEO Office built a fleet mileage tracker

“There's already a Confluence page.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Mainly because two teams disagreed about a column name for 10 weeks. Forked from a tutorial at 16:36 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Sarah, a working student

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

Neo4j because someone drew arrows on a whiteboard

Authentication:

every employee is an admin because support tickets were taking too long

Deployment:

deployed 51 minutes before the builder went on holiday

Responsible:

Sarah, who only knows the database

Documentation:

a Confluence page linking to another Confluence page

Security situation:

the last security review happened before the application existed

Future disaster:

It will get rewritten, producing exactly the same system.

Age: 29 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 29 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: €2.5m per year, 804 users, 6 departments depend on it.