Testing the Unknown: Quality Engineering in Driverless Ride Pooling Systems

As software systems become increasingly complex, traditional testing approaches are often no longer enough. This becomes especially visible in environments where systems interact with the physical world, rely on real-time data, and operate under conditions that cannot be fully predicted or predefined.

In this talk, I will share lessons learned from working on driverless ride pooling systems, where quality engineering extends far beyond feature validation. Using real-world examples, I will explore how teams approach testing in environments filled with uncertainty, how risk-based thinking helps prioritize what matters most, and why system-level validation becomes more important than simply executing predefined test cases.

The session will cover practical challenges such as validating complex user journeys, dealing with hard-to-reproduce scenarios, testing interactions across multiple systems, and building confidence when complete certainty is impossible. I will also discuss how quality practices evolve in rapidly changing organizations and how the role of QA engineers is shifting from traditional testing toward enabling quality across teams, systems, and processes.