
PlanOut: A framework for online field experiments - stanfordhci
http://facebook.github.io/planout
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ajtulloch
As a former user of this system at FB, I'm really excited it's being open
sourced. Eytan, Dean et al are some of the sharpest experimental design people
going round, and the paper (at
[https://www.facebook.com/download/255785951270811/planout.pd...](https://www.facebook.com/download/255785951270811/planout.pdf))
is worth checking out for a more formal introduction.

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zekenie
So do you have to use python to work with this? That's probably a stupid
question because clearly facebook's using all kinds of tech on the backend.
I'm trying to see how you'd integrate this into a rails or node project...

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zekenie
Found the answer to my question on the readme: "The implementation here
mirrors many of the key components of Facebook's PHP implementation of PlanOut
which is used to conduct experiments with hundreds of millions of users."

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ebakshy
I tried to build the python version of PlanOut with portability in mind. It
took only a few minutes to port the base class that does all the hashing from
PHP to Python. The the interpreter + a few core operators took about two
hours. Developing the Experiment and Namespace classes to work in a way that
we were happy with took a lot more time. I suspect that if you knew node / js,
and just wanted to do a direct port, it shouldn't be too hard.

We have a little more background on the project at:
[http://facebook.github.io/planout/docs/about-
planout.html](http://facebook.github.io/planout/docs/about-planout.html) and
I'd be happy to review any ports to other frameworks.

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cmelbye
Does Facebook use this system to turn on new features for a certain subset of
the user base to test those features out, or is this mainly for A/B testing
existing features?

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ebakshy
PlanOut has been used both for evaluating the effects of new product rollouts
/ encouragements and for more scientific experiments that look at the effects
of existing features. You may want to check out Section 4 of the PlanOut paper
at:
[http://facebook.com/publications/563103330455476/](http://facebook.com/publications/563103330455476/)

