A Former Employee built an expense approval workflow

“It's technically not production.”— Priya, A Former Employee

Reason:

Mainly because the official form has 54 fields and not the one that matters. Forked from a tutorial at 16:36 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Priya, a team lead

Build time:

8 evenings

Built with:

Access, because the database was already there

Database:

Cosmos DB because somebody had Azure credits

Authentication:

JWT validation checks that the token looks like a JWT

Deployment:

running on Windows Server because that machine was available

Responsible:

"the team", which is Priya

Documentation:

a Loom video whose owner account has been deleted

Security situation:

the last security review happened before the application existed

Future disaster:

It will turn out to contain the only correct pricing data.

Age: 4.6 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 396 users, alive 80x longer than intended, 10% chance of becoming business critical.