Friday morning, 6am, the race began to apply for the ‘second chance sales’ of Olympic tickets. According to a report in Monday’s Independent, somewhere in the region of 150,000 people applied for 2.3 million tickets. First come, first served. A desperate sprint to the finish line… but was the system ready?
How could they be confident that the site could cope with the stress of 150,000 people scrambling to enter their details? Surly following vigorous testing processes there would be no problems? Surely the ticketing system for an event of this magnitude would not be allowed to go live until it had been exhaustively tested? Particularly following the shameful credit card debacle back in March (here’s a reminder of that little stumbling block, courtesy of the Guardian Money Blog).
But what if the data used to test the system was not fit for purpose? If their test data was of poor quality the system could not be tested to its ultimate performance level. If this were indeed the case, perhaps the result would be thousands of angry people, allowed to book tickets for events which had already sold out. That sounds familiar.
Your Comments
Zach Friday, 8th July 2011 at 17:17
Typically, they’ll test an equestrianism ‘arena’, but won’t test the means of getting people to fill it! Tut tut tut…
Lena Monday, 12th September 2011 at 8:38
This does look proisming. I’ll keep coming back for more.