When it comes to your website, copy, sales pages, or any other element of your business that needs some improvement, you can benefit from using Agile experiments. Agile experiments are also known as split testing or A/B testing. They are small variations that you make to a single element of your website or product and then measure how it performs compared to the original.
Agile experiments are great techniques to validate your hypothesis. In this section, we’ll talk about how to conduct them.
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Experiment As An Agile Team – Set Up An Experiment Team
The team should be small, cross-functional, and autonomous. The team needs to have all the skills required to develop the experiment. It’s also important that the team members are empowered to make decisions about their own work and given absolute freedom from other teams or stakeholders.
To ensure high performance, you need to set up an experiment as a dedicated product team or feature team in your organization. You can also use this technique for single-feature experiments within larger projects that are already underway.
Plan The Experiment
Before you start, it’s important to define the problem. What are you trying to achieve? What is your goal? Is it something measurable and tangible like losing weight or improving critical thinking skills, or is it more of a nebulous desire like feeling less stressed out and more confident in life?
Once you have defined your goal and put it down on paper (or in a document), think about how long it will take for you to get there. If your goal is losing 20 pounds over six months, then that would be a good time frame for an experiment. If your goal is more abstract and difficult to measure (like being able to express yourself clearly in front of others), then try setting up weekly check-ins with yourself where you track how well you have done at meeting this objective.
It’s also important to not only think about what success looks like but also what failure looks like—and then decide if either one of those outcomes would be acceptable based on what matters most in terms of achieving this particular outcome within the next six months.”
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Define The Hypothesis
- Define the hypothesis
- The hypothesis is a statement that you want to test. It should be clear, concise, and debatable. For example: “The number of defects that were reported by users during week 1 is equal to the number of defects reported by users during week 2.”
- Make sure your hypothesis is specific enough so that you can get data about it. If it’s too vague, then there’s no way for you to know if your experiment was successful or not!
- You may also want to consider why someone might disagree with your hypothesis (or what they would say in response). This helps keep things focused on the most important part of conducting experiments—testing new ideas!
Execute The Experiment
First, you need to plan for the experiment. If your experiment is a short one (one week), then you only need to plan for short-term results. If, however, it is a longer experiment (three months or more), then your planning should span both the short and long term.
Second, once you have a rough outline of your plan in place, consider how you’ll learn from the results of each experiment. What metrics can help evaluate whether or not it was successful? Will these metrics be enough? Are there other ways of evaluating success that you haven’t considered?
Thirdly—and this might seem obvious but trust me when I say it’s important—make sure everyone on your team knows what they’re supposed to be doing! This means communicating any changes in process (or lack thereof) clearly so that everyone has an understanding of how their individual work fits into key project milestones like launch dates or product releases.
Analyze And Conclude The Results
- Analyze your data closely.
- A deeper analysis of the results can help you learn more about how people interact with the product and how they’d benefit from it.
- For example, if you’re testing a new feature, try going through the data to see which users are using it most often (or not at all). You might also consider checking out their other behaviors and metrics, such as average session length or conversion rate to get a better understanding of what’s happening here.
- Conclude the experiment.
- Whether you’ve found success or not, don’t forget about your main goal: discovering how users react to certain changes in order to optimize their experience with your product. This is why it’s so important that every step along the way leads back toward this purpose; otherwise, there won’t be any point in doing these experiments at all!
Validate Your Learning And Decide Next Steps
Once you have a hypothesis, it’s time to validate your learning. An important step in this process is sharing the results and learning with the rest of your organization. The next steps will depend on what was learned from your experiment, but they may include:
- Revisiting the product backlog and adding new features that were discovered through experimentation
- Gathering more data before making a decision on whether or not to release an experimental feature
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Conclusion to How To Conduct Agile Experiments
Yes, Agile experimentation might seem like it is not the best fit for any given case, but we hope you will see from the examples below that Agile experimentations are happening all over the place. The world of software is changing, and customers expect frequent (monthly) releases. Software as well is becoming a very different product than it was in the past with SaaS; new technologies and outsourcing are changing how things are built and delivered. Finally, competitors’ launch cycles are shrinking, and market timing is crucial. All these factors make Agile experimentation an important part of the future of software development. Contact us for additional insight into How To Conduct Agile Experiments.
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