Someone From Accounting built a source-of-truth selector

“We just need it until SAP is updated.”— Katrin, Someone From Accounting

Reason:

Honestly? Because the documentation was last updated 12 months ago. With 958 users and zero documentation.

Built by:

Katrin, a team lead

Build time:

19 minutes

Built with:

MongoDB, because the schema was 'still evolving'

Database:

a JSON file in Git called production-data.json

Authentication:

the tenant ID is a query parameter

Deployment:

restarted manually every Friday

Responsible:

Finance, according to IT

Documentation:

a Slack thread from August

Security situation:

the penetration test found it by accident

Future disaster:

It will be presented to management as evidence that shadow IT must stop.

Age: 5.2 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 4 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 272x longer than intended, older than the department using it, 18% chance of becoming business critical.