Lotterywest: Play Online - a cloud native web success

The Client

For over 90 years, Lotterywest has been a driving force for good in Western Australia. Established in 1932, this statutory authority has been generating funds for the community through its lottery games and supporting some of the state's most vital organisations.

As the only government-owned and operated lottery in Australia, Lotterywest is uniquely positioned to make a real difference in the lives of Western Australians. Its funding focuses on supporting the state's hospitals and health services, sports and recreation, arts and culture and charitable organisations.

The Challenge

When it was first conceived, Lotterywest's Play Online system had been an innovative solution to provide players with the option of buying their tickets online.

The development team was already managing and extending a Content Management Solution for the Lotterywest corporate website, and it made a lot of sense to build an online ticket purchasing capability into the same system.

But after a decade of sterling service, Play Online had become a victim of its own success. More and more people wanted the flexibility of online purchasing, and user numbers would skyrocket when jackpots grew large, leading to stability issues.

The system suffered from being built on an outdated monolithic web framework. Players' expectations had grown, and the web platform made it impossible to improve the user experience.

What's more, the system's overall fragility meant that making changes and getting them to production was infrequent, high risk and high stress. And with some key regulatory changes around the corner, it was time to bite the bullet and rebuild Play Online.

The Solution

Following a competitive tender, Mechanical Rock was awarded the contract to design, build and launch Lotterywest's new Play Online system.

Time was of the essence, so the primary objective was clear: using up-to-date, secure Cloud technology and Agile delivery techniques, to rebuild the existing Play Online system, "like for like".

If, along the way, opportunities emerged to make additional improvements, they were to be added to the backlog. Anything that improved security went to the top of the list, and improvements to the user experience were prioritised, and where feasible, they were added to the scope.

"Like for like" - but like what?

After agreeing on an AWS-hosted system architecture that emphasises keeping things as simple as possible for as long as possible, the team moved on to defining a baseline scope for the web application.

To begin this, Mechanical Rock mapped out the end-to-end user flow for the entire existing system. They ran a series of workshops to establish consensus on the scope of the new system.

These sessions provided an invaluable opportunity for the Lotterywest product team to explain the thinking behind key system features to the development team. This ensured the whole team had a shared vision and understanding of the system to be built. It also gave the product team the opportunity to weigh up possible changes as they went.

When an opportunity to improve the user experience emerged, the Mechanical Rock UX specialist would create a number of lo-fi wireframe experiments to explore options, which were presented back to the Lotterywest Product Owner, who made the call, and the application scope was updated accordingly.

This approach proved to be worth its weight in gold when the decision was made to launch an entirely new lottery game mid-way through the development of the system.

Testing in production

This approach had the major benefit of allowing the engineering team to prioritise building key features that were known, understood and defined. In parallel, and in the background, designers, product, marketing and others from the business were able to take a little more time. As a result, they could finesse decisions impacting the user flow, agree on changes to marketing copy changes and so forth - all without impacting the pace of delivery.

Thanks to the work at the outset defining and agreeing the system architecture, the Mechanical Rock infrastructure experts were also able to work in parallel with the application build. Their mission was to create the deployment environments in AWS as soon as possible.

This was particularly important, because the project was bringing about major changes to the software development and release process. The ultimate success of the engagement depended on Lotterywest stakeholders co-designing, understanding, and being comfortable with the new approach. That's why the Mechanical Rock team took a "product development" approach to building the CI/CD process.

Having the production infrastructure in place as early as possible meant the Lotterywest product team could do ample User Testing of the newly built application prior to the public launch.

What's more, using Terraform meant the entire AWS infrastructure could be managed under source control. Any changes to the infrastructure must go through a very tight governance process - and everything leaves an audit trail.

Boring, boring...

All of this meant that when the system went live to the public in early June 2024, it had already undergone extensive testing in the production environment. Actually going live was a straightforward process of changing a firewall rule and repointing a DNS record.

Although Mechanical Rock remains available for ongoing support of the new system, one of the project’s key goals was to empower the Lotterywest team with the skills and knowledge to enhance the system themselves into the future - in terms of both the Play Online application itself and the infrastructure supporting it.

To maximise the likelihood of success, Mechanical Rock devised bespoke internal training to share knowledge around DevOps processes, Terraform tooling and key AWS principles. This paved the way for running several real-life scenarios to help the team gain experience managing incidents should they occur in the new platform.

In addition, as the production launch of the new system approached, the Lotterywest "business as usual" developers joined forces with the project team, pairing on the development of new features to be released post-launch. This way, they were brought up to speed in the entire stack, making the transition from project to ongoing product development as smooth as possible.

Lotterywest Play Online

The Benefits

The Play Online project was a massive success.

Players can now buy tickets through a beautiful, streamlined, secure and extremely performant web application. The Lotterywest software engineering team are working efficiently with up-to-date front end development frameworks and tooling. And Quality Control has been made easier, thanks to better automated testing, which now leaves an audit trail as part of the build and release process.

Deploying the system to production, once a high-risk activity that needed vast amounts of preparation and paperwork, has become so safe - so "boring" - that the engineering team now aim for a minimum of two production releases per week.

The upshot is that technology is no longer a blocker.

The digital product team is empowered to push ahead. Whether imagining new and innovative ways to delight the online player, responding to user feedback, or meeting the evolving demands of the regulators, the team can operate with the knowledge that when they want to, they can move really, really fast - without breaking things.