Business Development built a shipment exception tracker

“The budget expires this week.”— Priya, Business Development

Reason:

Officially because the demo environment contains real customer data. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Priya, someone from Procurement

Build time:

7 evenings

Built with:

a Rails app from 2016 nobody updated

Database:

a database dump from October that is "probably current enough"

Authentication:

the certificate expired 317 days ago

Deployment:

deployed from a Git commit nobody has pushed

Responsible:

Olivier, because their email address is in the config

Documentation:

a spreadsheet cell containing "ask Tobias"

Security situation:

production secrets are in the frontend bundle

Future disaster:

It will outlive two reorganisations.

Age: 1.9 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 210 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 229 users, alive 100x longer than intended, 10% chance of becoming business critical.