A/B Testing Deployment Strategy¶
Introduction¶
Deployment comprises everything from creating software or hardware to putting it on the market. It covers the development, installation, running, testing, coding, configuration, making improvements and releases of software or hardware.
The good thing is that you can use various testing deployment strategies, so identifying a deployment strategy that aligns with your software is essential.
The A/B deployment strategy is one of the most popular software development techniques as it allows developers to test two versions of the same application or feature on your userbase. The first version is known as the A version, while the second one is the B version, when you’re confident of the effectiveness of the B version, you can offically push it to completely replace the A version.
Gone are the days when users complained about newly launched web page designs or features after an official release, prompting a meeting on the redesigning or drawback of the new version, with an A/B testing deployment strategy, you save time, earn more and make your users happy.
Let’s delve deeper into the A/B Testing strategy.
A/B Testing Deployment Strategy¶
As long as you make many daily decisions about your app, whether it's the look and feel of a button, the text designed to get people to try out a new feature, or how often you show ads, you need a deployment strategy.
While these changes might seem small individually, they can significantly impact your app and web page success. As a organization, your userbase’s reaction to every change is very important.
Instead of relying on the company employees who worked on the feature and sometimes getting biased answers, an external set of testers can be used. This is where the A/B testing deployment strategy comes in.
The A/B strategy involves taking a subset of your users, usually with something in common e.g the browser they use. Then, each group sees a slightly different version of your app, then you can measure how your users interact with your app in each of these groups.
External Influence¶
Since different groups are all using your app simultaneously; any external change, will affect all your users equally.
So if there's a noticeable change between the groups, you can be pretty confident the change in the behaviour you are seeing is due to the change within your app and not some external factor.
How it works¶
The first version known as the A version, while the second one the B version. A/B testing deployment strategy works by routing a subset of your users to the B version.
The new B version may be an improvement to the older A version, or it may have bugs, just be unaesthetically pleasing or tone-deaf. Regardless, that’s what we want to find out before offically replacing the A version.
In other words, if you have one user who uses both A and B versions of your website simultaneously, it is most likely that they can get confused because of the various changes being made.
Implementing the A/B deployment strategy¶
To understand how to implement the A/B deployment strategy, you must know that there are two basic ways to update your product:
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You could either create a new version of your product and release it as an update, or
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You can change one or more features on your current live site so that users will see these changes when they visit again, the same applies to your app.
The word “live site” has been used here instead of just “site” because this term refers specifically to a web page where users can interact with your product directly and see results immediately instead of being redirected elsewhere.
With ‘live site’, they click or input the link, which takes them directly to the site without any stops or breaks.
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Use Case 1: If someone clicks on an image on a homepage, it would be considered a live site because they can immediately see the result without having any other step between them clicking something and having access over again once they've clicked something else within the application itself instead.
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Use Case 2: The server response to a request by a user with ID 1 should return the B version, while others return the A version.
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Use Case 3: If you want to improve the SEO performance of your website by 10%, then you should run two versions of it (A and B) and measure how users interact with each version.
A/B Testing with Cloudoor¶
After deploying the A and B versions, you can compare their responses using tools like Google Analytics, e.t.c.. After analysing all those metrics, decide what works best for your business goals. Keep only one version or run both simultaneously then find the perfect balance between the two and create the perfect version.
The first version (A) is called “Control” and will be used by all users except those assigned as testing users. The second version (B) is called “Test”, and it will be used only by testers so that they can evaluate if there are any improvements made in either one version or another based on their feedback.
A/B deployment is managed behind a load balancer when you have to target growth between an existing application and one that has not been released.
Another plus about the A/B testing deployment strategy is that with this deployment strategy, everything can be tested, from text to images, etc. It can be tested if it is going on the app or web page.
You can understand users' reactions to the changes you make in the app or website. You can A/B test; Colour schemes, Images, Header, Headline styling, Subject line, Content depth, Navigation, etc.
Conclusion¶
No software can do without the deployment process, and adopting the right strategy eradicates a lot of technical hassles. Cloudoor offers a streamlined process of deploying and managing both versions.
If you want to read about more deployment strategies, have a look at: