A unit test becoming prod data? That’s really all I’ve got and that’s pretty unforgivable.
Do we pick something properly secure and nail our asses to the wall if it is ever found out, or do we pick something that looks like negligence so it can be shrugged off even if it makes discovery more likely?
Add to that eMudhra's quick exit, stage left. There is definitely something that smells rotten here.
Some people just follow a spec and don't stop to think what that spec is supposed to accomplish.
Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.
It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.
And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.
An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.
Thousand line shell scripts that use expect to drive 30+ answers to a multi-choice interactive tui (that only works on one version of redhat from 2008 or something) is not so unusual, can totally understand how it happened. No excuses in that though.