A Temporary Taskforce built yet another project tracker

“Sales already promised it.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Honestly? Because the spreadsheet has 153,473 rows and 77 tabs. With 2 users, one of whom is the CEO.

Built by:

Katrin, a field technician

Build time:

5 hours 43 minutes

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

9,761 XML files generated by SAP

Authentication:

the firewall is disabled because it blocked something

Deployment:

deployed from a branch called new

Responsible:

Petra, according to Jira

Documentation:

a diagram on a whiteboard, photographed, then deleted

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will turn out to be the only system that knows the real numbers.

Age: 77 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 77 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 369 users, 10% chance of becoming business critical, alive 3x longer than intended.