Case Study:
Cello Parking App
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:
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
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.
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 real-world mobile app testing program with a geographically distributed group of skilled testers, who volunteered to privately test the app across genuine parking scenarios in Israel
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
The real-world field testing program delivered the validation coverage that Cello needed to move forward with confidence on both features. Key outcomes included:
- Both new features were validated under genuine driving and parking conditions across multiple Israeli cities and regions, providing a level of assurance that lab testing could not achieve.
- Issues related to GPS detection accuracy, notification timing, and session management behavior were identified and surfaced to the development team through structured, actionable reports.
- Multi-device and multi-OS coverage confirmed cross-platform consistency (or flagged inconsistencies for resolution) across a representative mix of iOS and Android devices.
- The geographic diversity of the testing confirmed that the features functioned correctly across different urban environments, street types, and network conditions across Israel.
- Cello received clear, well-documented test results that could directly inform development decisions and support a confident, quality-assured product launch.
Key Success Factor
The defining factor in the success of this project was Ubertesters’ ability to mobilize a distributed network of real car owners across Israel and coordinate them to execute precise, structured testing scenarios in authentic real-world conditions. Unlike synthetic test environments, the field-based approach generated data that reflected actual driver behavior, live GPS signals, real network performance, and genuine parking interactions.
Why Ubertesters
Cello chose Ubertesters because no other testing approach could replicate the real-world conditions that their new features depended on. Ubertesters provided:
- A community of vetted, car-owning testers based in Israel, available to conduct field testing on demand
- Geographic reach spanning North, Central, and South Israel, without the need for Cello to recruit or manage testers themselves
- Natural device diversity through testers using their own iOS and Android smartphones
- A proven platform for structured test case execution, issue reporting, and real-time progress tracking
- A dedicated project manager to handle all coordination, communication, and quality oversight
- End-to-end management of the testing program, from tester selection through to final reporting, minimizing the operational burden on the Cello team
For features that only come to life behind the wheel, Ubertesters delivered the only testing solution that truly matched the challenge.
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