Case Study: Cello Parking App

Case Study

Overview

Cello is a leading parking and mobility payment application widely used across Israel. The platform allows drivers to start and stop parking sessions, pay for parking through their smartphones, receive notifications, and manage mobility-related services directly from the app.

The company continuously expands its functionality to make urban mobility more seamless and automated for drivers. As part of this effort, Cello introduced new features designed to simplify parking management and prevent unnecessary parking fees. GPS-based features require real-world validation, as they cannot be reliably tested in controlled lab environments.

Because these features rely heavily on real driving behavior, geolocation accuracy, and timing, validating them under real-world conditions became essential before launch.

GPS-based features require real-world validation, as they cannot be reliably tested in controlled lab environments.

Industry: Smart Mobility / Parking Technology

Company website: http://cello-app.com/global/

Company size: Approximately 50–200 employees.

Location: Holon, Israel

Test object: Mobile Payment & GPS-based Parking Management System

Testing Type: Real-world Testing, Functional Localization, and UX Testing

Platform: iOS and Android

Brief information about
the company

Challenge

Cello was developing two new features that introduced a level of complexity that standard QA testing simply could not address:

1. Automatic Parking Session Management
This feature was designed to automatically start a parking session when a driver parks (after getting the driver’s consent and confirmation to start the parking) and stop the payment when the vehicle leaves the parking area. For this to work reliably, it had to detect precise GPS coordinates, vehicle motion, and timing, in real parking scenarios across diverse urban environments.

Challenges

2. Parking Time Reminder & Extension This feature needed to alert drivers as their paid parking time approached expiry and allow them to extend the session directly through the app. The challenge lay in ensuring the timing logic and push notification delivery worked reliably across devices, operating systems, and varying network conditions.

The nature of both features made traditional testing environments inadequate. Key challenges included:

Both features were entirely dependent on real-world driving behavior, physical parking actions, and live GPS data, none of which can be meaningfully simulated in a lab. Israel’s parking ecosystem varies significantly across regions:

Regional Differences: Street layouts and network coverage differ between northern cities, Tel Aviv, and southern regions.
Geographic Coverage: Testing required wide locations to ensure reliable location-based performance.
Real-World Validation: GPS features cannot be reliably tested in lab environments and require field validation.

The project had to be coordinated across many testers in real driving conditions, which required strict scheduling, precise test execution protocols, and reliable communication channels.

Solution

Ubertesters designed a comprehensive crowd testing and real user testing program built for global ecommerce and payment testing, mirroring genuine customer behavior across real-world customer journeys, including post-purchase flows. Rather than simulating transactions, our testers conduct real purchases using actual addresses and payment methods, providing ground-truth insights that no lab environment can replicate. Test cycles run on a rolling basis across active markets, with structured findings delivered to the client team through detailed reports that highlight issues by severity, market, and journey stage, enabling fast prioritization and resolution

Solution

Tester Recruitment & Selection

Ubertesters selected testers from its community who were car owners based across Israel, covering the North, Central, and South regions of the country. Testers were briefed on the test objectives, onboarded to the Ubertesters platform, and equipped with detailed test case instructions to ensure consistency across all locations. The program engaged 30 testers across 3 regions (North, Central, and South Israel), using a mix of iOS and Android devices.

Real-World Field Testing

Each tester drove to parking locations, triggering the automatic session start.This included:

Arriving at a parking spot and triggering the automatic session start
Driving away from the parking spot to validate automatic session termination and payment stop
Waiting for the parking time to approach expiry and validating receipt of the reminder notification
Extending the parking session through the app and confirming that the extension was processed correctly

Outcome

Key Success Factor

The success of this engagement comes down to authenticity and scale: real testers, real transactions, and real local conditions across every key market managed end-to-end by Ubertesters with minimal internal involvement from the client. Four-plus years of continuous global testing have allowed quality standards to evolve alongside the platform and its growing partner network.

Why Ubertesters

When your platform powers hundreds of brands across 200+ markets, there is no room for inconsistency in the customer journey. The complexity of validating real order, fulfillment, and returns flows across a distributed retailer network in authentic local conditions requires a partner with global reach, real-user authenticity, and the operational depth to run it all. That’s what Ubertesters delivers.

Real testers, real transactions. Not synthetic scripts. Genuine purchases with authentic payment methods and real delivery addresses.
Global tester network. Local testers in every key market provide country-specific insights that no remote team can replicate.
Minimal internal overhead. Ubertesters manages the entire testing cycle, from tester coordination to detailed reporting, with minimal time or resource demands on the client’s team.
Long-term reliability. Four-plus years of continuous engagement reflect the depth of trust and consistency of results delivered.