Performance Testing Optimization for Shutterfly's Customer Experience

Our experts worked on optimizing the continuous performance testing scheme. Together with Shutterfly’s team, we managed to uphold the site's competitive advantage delivering a superior customer experience.

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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.
Melissa Chawla
Former Sr. Manager of Performance Engineering, Shutterfly

Meet Our Client

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.

Understanding Challenges

Shutterfly's team needed help to clearly understand the system's behavior, predict potential crashes, and take the necessary measures to uphold its reputation for reliability.

They required assistance in building a performance testing suite and sought greater clarity on how to improve unit performance tests and understand the coverage to which to aspire.

Illustration of a person at a laptop placing a chess piece on the screen and holding a connected-nodes icon, representing strategy and thoughtful decision-making.

Solutions and Activities

We leveraged the expertise of our performance testing team to optimize the execution of performance tests, improve test scripts, and adjust assertions.

With tools like Gatling, Jenkins, Grafana, and AppDynamics, we offered new insights. We integrated swiftly with the Shutterfly team, understanding their unique continuous testing methodology, and started contributing promptly. On this path, we executed and profiled tests, and created detailed reports.

For all this being done, we attended daily meetings, provided valuable suggestions for improvement, and consistently added value to the team.

Results and Achievements

We charted the path for intense testing to scale their business of preserving people's precious memories. Some highlights of our work include:

Improved site performance by revising and expanding performance test coverage with their CI pipelines using Gatling and Jenkins, providing early feedback upon degradation in performance. This helped uphold the site's competitive advantage of delivering a superior customer experience.
Enhanced reliability through high traceability between tests and incidents, offering thorough information and insights on incidents.
Increased test efficiency by achieving more coverage in less time, which allowed for faster and more comprehensive testing.

These efforts contributed to maintaining the site's competitive advantage of delivering a superior customer experience, reinforcing Shutterfly's business of preserving people's precious memories.