
A/Bingo 1.0.0 Official Release - stakent
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/14/abingo-1-0-0-official-release/
======
patio11
I didn't think this would necessarily be HN material so I didn't bother
submitting it, but apparently someone disagrees with me.

I figured I had to "professionalize" A/Bingo a bit because recently from
reading my email I get the impression that it is looking less like the 10%
time project from my 10% time project and more like "Oh, effity, if this
breaks businesses with employees start losing money." So I did a bit of code
cleanup, wrote some tests, and created a versioning plan so that folks
depending on it are not totally on their own for evaluating whether a
particular commit will break stuff if they pull it in.

Since I had the opportunity I also made some changes to the user experience,
such as decreasing the amount of code you have to write even further, and
incorporating the Minimum Viable Dashboard.

If you aren't A/B testing yet, I want to change that. Tell me what I need to
do to make it happen.

~~~
dlib
I'm going to have a look at this in a few weeks. I only knew about Vanity so
I'm glad I came across this post.

Does A/Bingo also auto-select an alternative if there is a 95% reliability
that it's better?

~~~
patio11
No, it does not.

Vanity and A/Bingo have some fundamentally different takes on the problem.
This is totally fine -- there are a lot of good ways to do A/B testing just
like there are a lot of good ways to parse an HTML document. Use whichever
fits your needs.

I'm happy to answer specific implementation questions, but the bumper sticker
version is "In general, Vanity wants to be your one-stop measurement shop.
A/Bingo wants to make A/B testing so easy you do it automatically, every
single time."

~~~
michael_dorfman
How about "A/Bingo vs Google Website Optimizer"? What's the bumper sticker on
that comparison?

~~~
patio11
A/Bingo: Written by programmers, for programmers. GWO: written by an
advertising company, to be used by non-technical stakeholders in marketing.

GWO makes _significant_ compromises on usability -- both for the site's
programmers and the site's users. Previously I recommended it only very
hesitatingly, to non-technical marketer types. These days Visual Website
Optimizer exists and it is embarrassingly better in every possible way for
that audience, including the WYSIWYG interface.

You can read my thoughts on GWO at length in the A/Bingo documentation.
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/compare>

~~~
paraschopra
Thanks for recommending <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/>

It exists to make A/B and Multivariate testing dead-simple for non-technical
types :)

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paraschopra
Patrick, as you said my tool (VWO) is for non-techies (and I know that) but
some of the users have been demanding an API of sorts for A/B and multivariate
testing. I have been perplexed on how a language agnostic API for A/B testing
can possibly exist. First of all, to make it language agnostic it would
probably need to work on HTTP REST but then how would it be different that
client side JavaScript based A/B testing.

Any thoughts on language independent API design for A/B testing?

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euroclydon
Would anyone familiar with ASP.NET MVC & ROR care to tell me how portable this
would be to ASP.NET MVC?

~~~
patio11
ASP.NET is not my bag, baby, but on the gratuitously painful enterprise-
friendly development platform that has put a roof over my head for the last
few years (J2EE) I think you could get the moral equivalent of this done in
under a month.

If you want to write yourself ASP.NET A/B testing stuff, send me an email and
I'll tell you what I know about the design tradeoffs.

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recurser
Nice writeup, looks great. btw a tiny typo: "I intend to migration my own
deployment to Redis"

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jasonkester
Any chance of offering a download that doesn't require me to install GIT on my
computer?

~~~
patio11
Watch out, first you start using SVN over git and then people will assume you
don't own a MacBook and then your chances of Rails development jobs are shot
:)

<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/files/abingo.zip>

At the moment that is created by hand and so it won't be automatically
updated. I'll figure out a more permanent solution later.

~~~
jasonkester
Thanks for that. Given your writing about the pain of dealing with open
source, I would have expected you'd have that autogenerating from the start.

For what it's worth, the reason I'm not running git on my Linux box is that
I'm a C# guy by choice. ABingo seems like something the .NET world needs, so I
want to look into porting it.

~~~
patio11
I made it available through git because that is the de-facto standard
distribution method for Rails coders these days, who are the audience I needed
to reach with it. If it were consumer-facing, oh yeah, I would have done
something much easier from the getgo.

I concur that .NET desperately needs an A/B testing framework. Stack Overflow
should have one. Give me their worst .NET engineer and two months -- one for
writing A/Boverflow and one for writing tests -- I could increase almost any
metric on that site by 10%. What is your worst engineer scheduled to do this
month that is more important than that?

That's a question I'd like to ask anybody who isn't A/B testing yet.
Seriously. What keeps you so busy that you can't adopt a low-risk, battle-
tested, low-investment strategy with stupendously scaling returns like A/B
testing? (I can only hope that every company with a web page pulled a Google,
built one of these internally, and keeps vewwwwy vewwwwy quiet about it for
fear of letting people know how easy it is.)

~~~
jasonkester
Unfortunately, my worst (and only) engineer is me, and he's busy trying to get
FairTutor.com launched by working out how to store dates as UTC and display
them correctly in local time zones so that students in LA can schedule lessons
with a teacher in Quito and not show up 3 hours late to class.

Once that's done (or instead of it because frankly this is more fun), we'll
see about getting a drop-in AB component built for ASP.NET too.

