How we test drive and test ride at MOIA.
by Ada Pohl
MOIA is what I like to call a full-stack service. The vehicles, drivers, and apps (including the public-facing user app, driver app, and navigation app) are all developed by MOIA.
Each app has different needs when it comes to testing.
Let’s go through the navigation app, which the drivers use within the cars to navigate to customers’ locations and then to their respective destinations.
It can be especially tricky to test. Verifying that we are able to compute a route when a passenger books a trip is one thing – but making sure that it is always a valid and a good route is another. Furthermore, how do you verify that the user interface of the app is intuitive to use while driving and being concentrated on the road?
In order to make sure our tests are realistic, our team that builds the navigation app uses two types of testing; test rides and test drives.
So what is a test ride and how is it different from a test drive, and what do we learn from each of them?
On a test ride each team member pretends to be a real MOIA customer. We book trips in groups of 2–4 so they have a chance to get pooled with other customers. When the vehicle arrives they just board the MOIA and enjoy the ride. But what do they learn from this?
If there are no customers in the vehicle, we tell the driver that we are MOIA employees looking for feedback on the navigation app. They then listen to general feedback, things that need to be improved, and feature requests.
However, when other customers are in the vehicle we just observe silently.
We then take what we learned to a post-ride meeting to figure out what and how we can improve.
The test drives, however, are a little bit different.
For this our team builds a beta version of the app with all the upcoming changes, and puts it on a device with which we then role-play the drivers and customers themselves.
This means that we take a car to a test environment, book trips, execute them by actually driving to the Pick-up and Drop-off stops, and observe the routing and the interaction with the app.
If everything works as expected, we know that they can confidently release a new version of their app.
This takes place every two weeks, and every MOIA employee (regardless of which team they work in) has the chance to participate in a test ride/drive to understand how our digital products work.
Want to join our test drives or test rides? The Vehicle Guidance team is looking for new colleagues. Check out our job opportunities.
