Continuous Experimentation Scenarios: A Case Study in e-Commerce

Controlled experiments on software variants enable e-commerce companies to increase sales by providing user-adapted functionality. Our goal is to understand how the context of experimentation influences tool support. We performed a case study at Apptus that develops algorithms for e-commerce. We investigated how the case company uses experiments through five semi-structured interviews. We identified four main scenarios of experimentation and found that there are stark differences in tool support for them. The scenarios illustrate that the aptness of tool support for experiments depend on four characteristics: (1) what the goal of the experiment is;
validate
or
optimize
, (2) whether the experiment is performed
internally
in the organisation or
externally
, (3) whether decisions are taken
automatically
or
manually
, and finally (4) whether the experiment should be repeated or is a
singleton
. These insight can be used by practitioners with an interest in efficient experimentation and to form a basis for further research into a taxonomy of experiments for software.