Maintenance built a custom authentication system, unfortunately

“It's more of a prototype.”— Katrin, Maintenance

Reason:

Allegedly because the spreadsheet has 183,462 rows and 18 tabs. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Katrin, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

8 evenings

Built with:

Power Apps, licensed to one employee

Database:

a SOAP service returning XML from 9 years ago

Authentication:

the incident response plan is "call personName"

Deployment:

deployed on Monday immediately before a public holiday

Responsible:

Daniel, who insists they are not the owner

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

the threat model is "why would anyone attack us?"

Future disaster:

It will delete records older than 38 days, including the important ones.

Age: 3.4 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 4 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago · original builder left 1219 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 2 departments depend on it, the builder has left, alive 14x longer than intended.