A seamless system transition for Lotto, supported by rigorous QA & testing
OVERVIEW
Lotto set out to replace its long-standing gaming system – central to how New Zealanders play every week – while keeping service steady across both retail and digital channels. With high public trust at stake and no room for disruption, Lotto partnered with Assurity Consulting to strengthen quality assurance and manage the complexity of the transition. The result was a seamless launch that players never noticed, uninterrupted service across the country and a modern platform ready to handle demand at any scale.
KEY OUTCOMES
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Lotto New Zealand is a Crown entity responsible for operating the country’s regulated lottery games, including Lotto, Powerball and Instant Kiwi. Established in 1987, it delivers secure, responsible gaming across retail and digital channels. All profits are returned to the community through the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board, supporting recreation, arts, culture, sports and thousands of local initiatives every year.
THE CHALLENGE
Transforming Lotto’s core technology system is no trivial matter, confirms Chief Transformation and Technology Officer, Sarah Thirlwall. “Our prior system had reached the end of its contract, so we put out an RFP, which was won by Scientific Games in the USA. This system is existentially important for Lotto, effectively at the heart of everything we do, from retail shops through to online games. We were changing this system without disrupting the customer-facing online or retail experiences.”
Named the EDGE (Experience Driven Gaming Engine) Programme, the initiative is among the most significant technology upgrades in Lotto’s history. In addition to the online web and mobile applications, 1140 retail stores were upgraded with new terminals that all had to go live on the same day.
Thirlwall adds that maintaining a consistent experience for players was only part of the challenge. The back-end replacement had to ensure that every system, process and data flow continued to operate seamlessly after migration.
“While we have an internal QA team, it became clear that the scale of the EDGE programme depended on augmenting that team with a broad range of experience, including capabilities essential to project delivery, but which aren’t generally used in the day-to-day line of business,” she adds. “Notably, performance testing was part of those ad hoc capabilities.”
Lotto’s Director of Software Delivery, David Gortner, highlights why. “Performance testing goes to the nature of our business; we can have a $4 million draw one week, and a $50 million draw the next. Demand can shift from minimal to unprecedented in minutes.” Regardless of the draw size, he says, players expect – and receive – consistent performance.
OUR SOLUTION
Thirlwall notes that few providers in New Zealand can deliver the depth and breadth of quality assurance required for a programme of this scale. “We knew Assurity Consulting through prior use of its services, so they were very much a known quantity,” she says.
From June 2024 through to a Go-Live in September 2025, the project included:
- System Integration Testing (SIT): Validating integration between Lotto’s ecosystem and the new Scientific Games engine across retail, online and operational systems.
- Functional Testing: Ensuring applications and processes behaved in line with business requirements.
- Data Migration Testing: Verifying the accuracy and integrity of player, retail and transactional data across platforms.
- UAT/BAT Testing: Coordinating 13 business units to confirm new workflows, reports, processes and system behaviours matched BAU expectations.
- Product Verification Testing (PVT): Confirming compliance, quality and readiness for Go-Live.
- Performance Testing: Assessing the platform’s ability to handle extreme demand, including mathematically modelled stress testing ahead of the November 2025 $55 million draw.
Gortner highlights the value of bringing in specialist capability as required. “With our orchestration model, we’re accustomed to working with vendors as one team, and Assurity has readily provided those skills and people who have easily slotted in and acted as any other team member. That’s really important to us – those relationships of trust and accountability – and it builds on a great partnership.”
Assurity’s flexibility proved essential to delivery. “Initially, we started with two testers, but as more work was delivered and required evaluation and review, the team grew until at the peak, we had 15 Assurity people involved and a total of around 25, all working on testing and QA,” says Thirlwall.
Sarah Thirlwall – Chief Transformation & Technology Officer, Lotto NZ
In addition to supporting the design and implementation of a comprehensive testing framework – covering detailed test planning, business engagement models, reusable templates and daily reporting – Assurity contributed to the execution of more than 14,000 test cases across the programme.
RESULTS
Gortner points to the November $55 million draw as the most evident proof of value. “We were in the middle of it that week. This was a record draw that put us in crunch mode. Times like that feel like a full-blown DDOS attack, with hundreds of thousands of hits on our systems – but from legitimate players. Thanks to Assurity’s work, it all went off without a hitch.”
Thirlwall highlights Assurity’s ability to integrate with internal teams. “This plays a big role in achieving delivery on time and, in this case, under budget. With 13 business units, sometimes with competing priorities and reporting lines, Assurity worked flexibly and thoroughly, always with the end goal in mind.”
While he admits it’s a bit cheeky, Gortner says the value being delivered by Assurity Consulting means he’s almost tempted to ‘steal a few people’. “Obviously, that’s not going to happen, because we have a great partnership,” he smiles.
David Gortner – Director of Software Delivery, Lotto NZ
