$1.35 Billion, and still not IE7 compatible – Myki ticket system

$1.35 Billion, and we have an application which isn’t Internet Explorer 7 compatible! How clever is that?!?

It’s thrilling reading, here are some of the issues:

“Fifteen myki cards were rejected when attempting to use at the devices”
– they forget to tell the card reader about concession cards (Pensioner / Student cards)
“It would thus appear that the sale of multiple Short Term Tickets paid from myki somehow voids the myki card.”
– buy several tickets and have your myki wiped.
“Patron Call Centre scenario PA_2.3.3: attempted to print transaction history. Received error message ‘
System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path …'”
– In other words, the programmers have not coded error trapping for Directory and/or File Not Found.
“Patron Web Portal does not function adequately if Patron uses latest version of Windows Internet Explorer (v7).”
– next we will find out that it requires Microsoft Java Runtime.
“Unable to continue execution of Patron Call Centre / Web scenarios as previously established user profiles have been deleted.”
– In other words, we couldn’t finish the testing.

Based on the details in the sanitised report, and these reports are always sanitised to remove embarrassing things, it looks to me that:

the programmers are way behind, and are cutting corners, in order to meet deadlines.
the myki product is going to be further delayed.
that the hardware will require upgrades for it to be “fit for purpose”.
I doubt that the ticketing backend will scale.