A Former Employee built a timesheet approval app

“IT would have taken months.”— Sofia, A Former Employee

Reason:

Officially because somebody watched a 14 minute tutorial. With 931 users and 16 feature requests.

Built by:

Sofia, someone from Procurement

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

three databases, each claiming to be the source of truth

Authentication:

"auth is on the roadmap" — has been for 11 days

Deployment:

deployed from the main branch because branches were confusing

Responsible:

a consultancy that changed its name twice

Documentation:

an onboarding call everyone is expected to remember

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will cause IT to ask "what server?".

Age: 2.2 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 57x longer than intended, 13% chance of becoming business critical, 6 users.