Investor Relations built a licence renewal reminder

“It's just a webhook.”— Sarah, Investor Relations

Reason:

Allegedly because the export takes 12 minutes and sometimes produces an empty file. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Sarah, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

a CSV that gets overwritten every Wednesday

Authentication:

the firewall rule says "temporary"

Deployment:

behind a domain Miriam owns privately

Responsible:

Marco, because everyone else refused

Documentation:

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

Security situation:

a security review was scheduled for June and quietly cancelled

Future disaster:

It will be described as "legacy" before its first birthday.

Age: 5.9 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 6 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 306x longer than intended, older than the department using it, 11 users.