The Management Assistant built something with customer data and no permissions

“There's already a Jira ticket.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Because the source of truth depends on which department you ask. Forked from a tutorial at 17:19 and never cleaned up.

Built by:

Bastian, a key account manager

Build time:

2 hours 30 minutes

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a production table with no primary key

Authentication:

the security model is a locked office door

Deployment:

deployed straight to production on a Friday, no staging

Responsible:

Priya, who has never seen the source code

Documentation:

a Loom video nobody can find

Security situation:

logout only hides the menu

Future disaster:

It will send 2,856 duplicate emails.

Age: 6.3 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 823 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 54% chance of becoming business critical, alive 26x longer than intended, 26 users.