IT (yes, really) built a corrective action dashboard

“We only need it for this quarter.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Because the spreadsheet has 53,166 rows and 79 tabs. With a roadmap in the README, last touched 209 days ago.

Built by:

Sofia, someone from Procurement

Build time:

8 evenings

Built with:

MongoDB, because the schema was 'still evolving'

Database:

an FTP server nobody knows the password for

Authentication:

a login screen that accepts any password

Deployment:

running from an image tagged final-final

Responsible:

whoever happens to be on call

Documentation:

a Confluence page linking to another Confluence page

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

It will cause Legal to ask "who approved this?".

Age: 4.2 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €83k per year, 3 departments depend on it, 2 accidental connections.