On our BooT of this time, a silly and expensive bug.

Do you play lottery? Did you ever win?
No?? Well, maybe the reason of you not being yet a millionaire may be a nasty bug in your favorite lottery system…

In the B.C. Lottery Corp news page, the company explains and excuse the problem:

The BC Lottery Corporation wishes to notify Lottery players who use BCLC’s Internet Number Checker to check lottery results that a technical issue has occurred. On February 8, a software upgrade inadvertently prevented draw results from being presented correctly by secondary BCLC web addresses.

Those who checked tickets on sites other than www.bclc.com were informed that the Internet Number Checker had not detected a match to the official winning numbers. BCLC is concerned that some of these players may have, in fact, held a winning ticket.

Oh… YOU are concerned? I am concerned! Now let me find that old ticket…! 😉

More information in these news:

So, innocent people bought lottery tickets to fulfill their dream, but when checking in the automatic services whether they won or not, they may have received a ‘Looser’ message when they were entitled for a helluva lot of cash.

What does that says about B.C. Lottery Corp.? What does this says about their development staff – – and their testers?

A bug like this have uncountable bad effects, which range from lost of customer trust (!), to possible loose of Lottery Business Permit. Read, understand and beware: Don’t let your company be the next to frustrate customers and make the front page of newspapers with bad news!

 

This bug was also featured on StickyMind’s Between-the-Lines as Bug of the Month. And on their news site, here you have: http://www.stickyminds.com/newscenter.asp