A/B testing development - A developer overview (Part - 2)

In my previous blog Part 1, I have explained what is A/B testing and why we need A/B testing. Now I will discuss about different ways of A/B testing. Mainly there are two ways of A/B testing Client side and Server side.

Client Side A/B testing:

Relatively quick and easy to deploy. It actually works only on the browser where you will inject javascript code to the browser to modify your UI/UX. The client-side approach is by far the most common solution employed in the market today. In this approach, all tests and experiences are rendered from the client-side browser, using Javascript. There are few.

Advantages of client-side A/B testing:

1. Easy to deploy.
2. Easy to work around.
3. No backend limitations.
4. Even non-technical people can work by the help of visual editor.
5. Only need basic javascript, HTML and CSS to develop a complex test.
6. No risk to conflict with your production code.

Disadvantage of client-side A/B testing:

1. Only targeted on browser.
2. Some times control flicker can arise.
3. Limited to the page functionality not to the app functionality.
4. Not able to work on business logic.
5. Sometimes page takes time to load.
6. Few browser can block third party A/B testing tools to inject script.

Server-side A/B testing:

Server-side A/B testing is a form of experimentation where the variations of a test are rendered directly on the web server, before it is delivered to the client. So you need to deploy you variations code to the server.

Advantages of server-side A/B testing:

1. Write the same programming language which is using in the server.
2. Get more customising option in you app functionality.
3. No control flicker as code is coming from the server itself.
4. Work on any business logic inside your application.

Disadvantage of server-side A/B testing:

1. Time consuming and harder development process compare to client-side.
2. Every time needed production deployment to host the test.
3. Built into your web application tech stack.

There are many tools in the market to work on A/B testing. We will discuss about some A/B testing tools and their architecture in our future blog . Happy Coding !!!!!