Pic-Time
Pic-Time leverages Testim’s fast and flexible authoring to rapidly scale test automation
reduction in test cycle time
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increase in test automation
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Approximately 5000 tests per month
Company overview
Pic-Time is an online photo gallery platform for professional photographers and their clients. Since most photographers don’t have the time or knowledge to elevate their photography into a successful business, Pic-Times provides them with the tools to simplify photo delivery, amplify the visual experience, and maximize their business potential. Pic-Time’s innovative product suite includes online galleries, a smart store, marketing automation tools, and partnerships with select print labs worldwide.
Pic-Time is available on desktop, mobile, and tablet, with many customizable configurations available to its users, such as multilingual online photo galleries supported in 16 languages to fit a photographer’s needs.
New Pic-Time features are deployed weekly to production, with larger releases deployed monthly. It is common practice for Pic-Time to receive a platform suggestion from a customer and roll it out within a few weeks. This practice makes customers feel their input matters, but it requires rapid development and testing cycles to meet tight time constraints.
Amid rapid customer and product growth, Pic-Time’s front-end testing team struggled to keep up with a corresponding increase in required testing, which at the time was carried out entirely manually. Company leaders liked the idea of scaling with test automation, but past automation experiences at other companies had proven to be a resource drain.
- Industry: Technology
- Organization size: 100 employees
- Location: Israel
- Products:
Seeking a testing solution to keep pace with frequent releases
Shai Schcolnik, Pic-Time’s QA Lead-turned-QA Automation Lead since 2016, had been working to gain internal support to switch to automated testing. The turning point came when a critical bug slipped into production that made critical features unavailable. Schcolnik pointed out that the gap in test coverage could have been filled – and the error caught – if the team had a way to scale testing through automation. With a new understanding of the risks of insufficient testing, leadership gave Schcolnik the go-ahead to seek an automation solution.
“I considered a few testing alternatives, like building a testing infrastructure from zero or using Selenium or Python,” Schcolnik said. But because these frameworks require significant coding skills to both build and maintain the automation, “it would have taken me too long to get something working.”
He demonstrated this with a proof of concept using Selenium and Python to build one test case. It worked for three days, and then a change in the application’s underlying code broke the test script. It took Schcolnik another two days to update the script. With the understanding that scripted solutions wouldn’t solve Pic-Time’s testing scalability problem, Schcolnik sought a low code alternative.
Schcolnik noticed people in Facebook testing groups recommending Tricentis Testim, so he downloaded the free trial and used it to automate the same test. “The same test case took less than a day to do on Testim,” he says. “After a few tweaks, it has been working for a year now. Most of the tweaks aren’t test failures but minimal updates to reflect UI or text changes.”
