Field Service built a knowledge base with a search that does not search

“The quarter ends Friday.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Mainly because the audit is in 3 weeks. With 2 tests, all skipped.

Built by:

Kevin, a recruiter

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Next.js, because the tutorial used it

Database:

a JSON file in production

Authentication:

the password policy requires changing it every 30 days, so everyone adds 1

Deployment:

hosted on a server shared with 4 unrelated applications

Responsible:

Finance Business Partner, who calls it "the little tool"

Documentation:

a Notion page with one sentence and 18 empty headings

Security situation:

debug mode is enabled in production

Future disaster:

It will silently skip 8% of records.

Age: 1.6 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 577 days ago

Rated mythic mostly because: €6.4m per year, 813 users, alive 27x longer than intended.