Challenge

Shutterfly, Inc. is the leading manufacturer and digital retailer of high-quality personalized products and services that enable consumers to share and preserve their memories.

Founded in 1999.

Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Locations in many counties of The United States, and Israel.

More than +10,000 employees.

Acquired by Apollo Global Management for $2.7 billion upon its 20th anniversary.

One of America’s Best Employers of 2022 by Forbes magazine.

A heavily visited e-commerce site with a high level of complexity of its proprietary technology, Shutterfly.com’s system performance is a critical component of the company’s success and award-winning customer experience.

Shutterfly’s team needed help to clearly understand the system’s behavior, understand when problems like crashes may occur, and take the necessary measures to uphold its reputation for reliability. They needed help building a test automation suite. They also needed greater clarity on how to improve the way in which unit tests should be written and a better understanding of the coverage to which to aspire.

illustration performance testing

Solutions

By leveraging the expertise of Abstracta's performance testing team, the team optimized the execution of performance tests, improved test scripts, and adjusted assertions.

Abstracta's expertise with tools such as Gatling, Jenkins, Graphana, AppDynamics, and performance analysis provided new insights. We integrated with their team in a fast and efficient manner, understanding Shutterfly's unique continuous testing methodology, and joined it promptly. We attended daily meetings via teleconference, provided useful suggestions for improvement, and consistently added value to the team. We executed tests and profiled them, and created detailed reports.

Some highlights

  • Revised and expanded performance tests coverage with their CI pipelines using Gatling and Jenkins to provide early feedback upon degradation in performance
  • High traceability between tests and incidents.
  • Thorough information and insights on incidents.
  • Increase in test efficiency (more coverage in less time).

Results

In only five months, we drew the path for intense testing to scale their business of preserving people’s precious memories. This way, Abstracta contributed to upholding the site’s competitive advantage of delivering a superior customer experience.

illustration agile testing

"Abstracta management understood our unique testing needs and matched us up with a talented engineer who was quick to get up to speed with Gatling and our test environment. He asked apt questions, gave excellent status reports, and was overall a pleasure to work with. We look forward to continuing to work with Abstracta as the need arises."

Photo of Melissa Chawla

Melissa Chawla

FORMER SR. MANAGER OF PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING, SHUTTERFLY

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