A/B, multivariant testing with spring MVC

Question

I'd like to start an A/B testing and/or multivariant testing experience in an existing e-commerce website. This website is heavily relying on vanilla Spring + Spring MVC.

Many analytics products (like Google Content Experiments) handle stats collection + variant selection; you basically have to create one URL per variant (and configure each URL in GCE).

One could use:

• HandlerInterceptors to select the Handler at runtime
• Theme resolvers to choose CSS/static resources at runtime

Do these techniques match this use case?

Do you have experience with A/B testing or multivariant testing with Spring MVC?

Or maybe you think these features should be handled by a particular JavaScript framework, like cohorts?

Answer 1

I have had experience dealing with multivariant and a/b testing while using Omniture. You could almost certainly do everything that these testing suites do yourself, but you would have to build an awful lot of infrastructure to accommodate the variants and collate the relevant data and display it back in a meaningful way to those who are interested. Given the sheer volume of options that any of these types of testing suites come with, it would probably take a great deal of time to replicate this type of function on your own.

If you have the budget, I would recommend using one of the many tools that are specialized in doing this sort of thing. Of course, if you don't have the budget but have the time, I can see where building it yourself could be a lot of fun...

I'm not sure how much of an 'answer' this is more than just my opinion.