Hello friends! In this post, we are going to study about AB testing. Although it is not exactly a testing activity performed by the testing team but still people confuse it with other testing types. Also, there is no full form of AB testing. Yes, it is not Alpha-Beta Testing.
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AB Testing Definition
A/B testing is also known as split testing. In AB testing, we create and analyze two variants of an application in order to find which variant performs better in terms of user experience, leads, conversions or any other XYZ goal and then eventually keeping the better performing variant.
AB Testing Example
Let’s try to understand it with an example. Suppose we have an e-commerce website selling electronic goods to customers directly. Currently, on the listing page, 3 devices are displayed on each row with only necessary details like image, name, brand, and price of the device. Clicking on the image leads to the device description page containing all the details and a buy button.
Now, the product team comes up with an idea to change the UI and display only one product in each row with all the device details along with a buy button. The current UI allows users to navigate more devices at a glance but the user has to perform an additional click to see device details and buy option. The new proposed UI provides the user the opportunity to get all the details of the device on the listing page itself along with the buying option.
So, basically, we will have two variants of the application variantA and variantB-
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No matter how much analysis is done, releasing the new UI would be a big change and might backfire. So, in this case, we can use A/B testing. We will create the variantB UI and release it to some percentage of users. For example – we may distribute users in the ratio of 50:50 or 80:20 between the two variants- A and B. After that, over a period of time, we will observe the performance of the two variants and then determine which to chose and roll out the same to all the users.
In this way, AB testing helps in making the decision of choosing the better variant of the application.
With this, we have come to the end of this article. If you have any questions, please ask in the comment section. Also, check out our complete software testing tutorial below.