R&D built a rota planner

“We barely store passwords.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Mainly because the audit is in 9 weeks. Quietly rolled out to five countries.

Built by:

Anja, an analyst

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

three AI coding tools arguing through the same repository

Database:

Neo4j because someone drew arrows on a whiteboard

Authentication:

the encryption key is stored next to the encrypted data

Deployment:

running in Docker Compose on a machine named production

Responsible:

Marco, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

two architecture diagrams that disagree

Security situation:

the last security review happened before the application existed

Future disaster:

It will gain 85 users before anyone approves it.

Age: 7.7 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €383k per year, alive 94x longer than intended, 25% chance of becoming business critical.