Enabling the transportation of the future with QA

‘Connected’ is the way of the modern society and that is how things are going to be in the years to come. 

Certainly, the internet has been the pioneer of this connected revolution, and look how far we have come.  

This connectivity is not only between friends and families, but extends way beyond between businesses and their customers, between an individual and the world. 

Today, we have the convenience to track the exact status of our Pizza order, to locate the estimated position of our online shipment, to identify how far away our Uber is, and what not. 

As we proceed toward a truly connected future with the advancing IoT technologies and widespread adoption, it is time to take a look at the means of transportation. 

Although yes, our smartphones and the internet have enabled us to put things into motion without even changing our position, transportation still constitutes a critical part of the social and economic landscape. 

Therefore, it is important to bring transportation too within the connected realm in order to build a unified ecosystem. 

If we take a look at our current transportation systems, there has been evident progress in terms of technology, convenience, and connectivity. Electric vehicles, autonomous drones, self-driving cars, driverless fleet – everything is already in the pilot phase and on the brink of becoming the norm. 

While these technologies undoubtedly bring the transportation industry a few steps closer to the connected era, there is still a long way to go. 

Connected yet disparate 

Customers today have one-tap access to taxi hailing services like Uber and Lyft. They have apps on their smartphones that let them track the shipping status of their order.  

There is no need to go to the airport or the railway station to purchase a ticket as the service is conveniently available online. 

Definitely, the ease of access to the modes of transportation has increased manifolds as compared to only a few years back. 

But, given the growing demand and continuously advancing technologies, something stays amiss. 

There is an app for everything, connecting the customers to the service of their choice. But each of these services is not connected to each other.  

This lack of inter-connectivity among the services is the gap that the transportation industry needs to fill. 

Mobility-as-a-service 

Have you heard of the app called Whim? Originated in Helsinki, Whim is an all-in-one mobility app that builds a combined ecosystem of multi-modal transport. This ecosystem has come to be known as Mobility-as-a-service. 

As per Wikipedia, Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) describes a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility provided as a service. This is enabled by combining transportation services from public and private transportation providers through a unified gateway that creates and manages the trip, which users can pay for with a single account. Users can pay per trip or a monthly fee for a limited distance.  

According to Forbes, up to 2.3 billion car rides in urban centers are expected to be replaced by MaaS usage each year by 2023, a mere four years away. 

The Mobility as a Service (MaaS) market is expected to grow from USD 52.56 billion in 2019 to USD 280.77 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 23.2% during the forecast period. 

While the MaaS ecosystem sounds like a sci-fi representation, it is on its way of becoming the norm.  

With Mobility-as-a-Service, not only is there an opportunity for the transportation industry to create a new level of customer experience, but also for the global ecosystem to improve traffic conditions, environmental conditions, and vehicle management. 

MaaS is an ideal transportation solution for a smart city landscape and would require the similar, if not higher, level of sophisticated technologies. 

The key technologies that will play an integral role are data analytics, intelligent infrastructure, and seamless integration testing all across. 

The relationship between MaaS and QA 

The MaaS infrastructure and platform would highly depend on an effortless collaboration between commuters, integrators, and service providers. 

This would involve transmission and processing of data in real time, optimal performance of the platform under heavy load conditions, and unobstructed communication between the different components involved. 

Therefore, the success of Mobility-as-a-Service heavily relies on continuous quality assurance and software testing processes. 

Whether it is the individual components of smart, autonomous vehicles that run on software or the IoT sensors and systems that relay continuous data to the main processor, or the software platform that the end users operate to avail the service, everything needs to be tested thoroughly. 

There have been several incidents in the past to learn from in which a minor software bug led to fatal flaws in the vehicle management ecosystem or recall of an entire fleet of automobile model. 

As there are numerous individual components involved in a unified MaaS platform, the stakes are also much higher. A single glitch, however minor, may have a dominos effect on the entire platform. Therefore, it is only correct to say that Quality Assurance is the enabler of this future of the transportation. 

How can we help 

Implementing a robust and unified transportation management software involves overcoming multiple challenges such as performance, tracking, planning, management, weak automation frameworks, inadequate test infrastructure & test data management, improper functional & automation test coverage, unoptimized QA processes, poor development of automated test suites, integration of testing, and much more. 

Cigniti’s QA & Test Automation experts have in-depth experience in testing logistics & transportation management software end-to-end. Our services help check Logistics & Transportation applications for readiness, operational readiness, tracking, and analytics. 

Schedule a discussion with us today.