Page 1833 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 June 2021
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application logic was communicating with the database. We took the time to work with our developer partners to find solutions, to test them, and implement them. Most of the fixes involved changes to database tables and application logic to improve the efficiency of the activities.
Once the fixes were applied, the developer team tested this in a simulated environment where the site ran solidly at 600 voucher redemptions per minute. This was a significant improvement over the capability of the application logic previously, and it was what we needed to give the developer team and us the confidence that the solution implemented was working. With that load-testing having been carried out successfully, on Thursday 17 June the system was moved out of the testing environment and into the production environment to allow for more real-world user inputs to be observed.
The production environment testing began at 10:30 am on 17 June and included functional testing across the website. This meant functional features like business redemptions of vouchers, customers viewing codes, and businesses editing their profile details, were all tested with a view to identifying issues. The tests were done from desktop and mobile in different browser applications. While two minor issues were discovered during the functional testing, no issues presented that would have had significantly affected the performance or useability of ChooseCBR. These minor issues were addressed.
This was a big effort, and I express my thanks to the many people who put in long hours and late nights to ensure the issues were addressed and that we maintained our commitment to businesses that the scheme would be back on Friday 18 June. Additional developer hours were procured to resolve the technical issues, and these costs are being finalised.
When we had confidence with the testing, we advised businesses then industry stakeholders and consumers that the scheme would be back online the next day, as we had promised—Friday, 18 June, at 7 am. I have seen commentary about the timing of this and that another day may have been better. However, we had communicated we would need a week and businesses and the broader community were operating on that advice. Secondly, there was no ideal time to relaunch the scheme. However, even with spending patterns at double the rate we had seen the week before, we had an expectation that the remaining funding could be spent reasonably quickly. Relaunching on Friday meant we would capture businesses that only traded on weekdays as well as, we anticipated, businesses trading on the weekend.
We anticipated there would be weekend trade. We had seen about $200,000 in vouchers redeemed on each of 9 and 10 June. Even anticipating a doubling of redemptions to $400,000 a day, this would have meant the scheme would have gone through until at least Monday. Finally, we relaunched the scheme at 7 am to ensure that some of the smaller businesses that have strongly early morning trade, particularly early morning weekday trade, had the greatest chance of being able to participate.
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