CEO Office built a lost customer win-back tracker

“The quarter ends Friday.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Officially because the backlog contains 157,461 items and one priority. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Daniel, a recruiter

Build time:

19 minutes

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

Redis, but used permanently

Authentication:

the token expiration date is optional

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

a project group that technically no longer exists

Documentation:

a folder called Documentation containing another folder called Old

Security situation:

the last security review happened before the application existed

Future disaster:

It will duplicate every record after a timezone change.

Age: 350 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 33% chance of becoming business critical, alive 50x longer than intended, 1 departments depend on it.