Dog Shelter Team built a commission calculator with a rounding bug

“We only need it for this quarter.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Because the procurement tool is only reachable on the VPN, which drops every 51 minutes. With 2 tests, all skipped.

Built by:

Katrin, a field technician

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a database running in a container called final-final-db

Authentication:

the second factor is knowing which door the server room is behind

Deployment:

deployed through Jenkins, which has been "temporary" for 4 years

Responsible:

Tobias, who insists they are not the owner

Documentation:

a PDF containing screenshots of the old UI

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will break the day Katrin changes their password.

Age: 22 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 22 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 40% chance of becoming business critical, 61 users, €27k per year.