The Founder's Office built a campaign approval workflow

“AWS probably handles that.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Allegedly because the procurement tool logs you out after 6 minutes of inactivity. With 2 tests, all skipped.

Built by:

Bastian, a controller

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Access, because the database was already there

Database:

passwords stored in a column called password

Authentication:

the production token is in someone's shell history

Deployment:

deployed by emailing Invoices_Q3_use-this-one.xlsx to Elena

Responsible:

Bastian, who left 7 months ago

Documentation:

an architecture diagram containing a box labelled "magic happens here"

Security situation:

password reset emails contain the old password

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 8.7 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago · original builder left 2420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 4 departments depend on it, alive 227x longer than intended, 23% chance of becoming business critical.