The SharePoint Team built a website change request portal

“The password changes every year.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Allegedly because the architecture diagram contains a box labelled "magic". Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Petra, a recruiter

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a Postgres replica that accidentally became primary

Authentication:

the tenant ID is a query parameter

Deployment:

hosted in Priya's Azure subscription

Responsible:

Miriam, who inherited it during a reorganisation

Documentation:

a README that begins with "temporary notes"

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by another tool built by Miriam.

Age: 2.9 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 250 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 51% chance of becoming business critical, 84 users, alive 152x longer than intended.