Operations built a PTO approval app

“There's already a Jira ticket.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Honestly? Because someone built a prototype during lunch. Quietly rolled out to two countries.

Built by:

Petra, a product owner

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

Svelte, which nobody else here writes

Database:

Firebase with open read rules since November

Authentication:

the production token is in a Jira ticket

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

Sarah, because they clicked "create project" first

Documentation:

three different architecture diagrams

Security situation:

the vulnerability scanner is blocked by the firewall

Future disaster:

It will send 9,128 duplicate emails.

Age: 6.8 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 119x longer than intended, 21% chance of becoming business critical, older than the department using it.