Test Lab Introduction

What is Test Lab?

Test Lab is an open-source, self-hosted feature management and A/B testing platform.

Test Lab provides feature management infrastructure for the creation of feature toggles, rollouts, and experiments.

• Toggles and Rollouts are features that are active or inactive for all users of an application or a specified percentage of users, respectively.
• Experiment features include two or more variants, and each user enrolled in an experiment is presented with one version of an application depending on the variant assigned.

Test Lab includes native SDKs to evaluate features and allow rendering of distinct variants. The SDKs can facilitate experiments in both server-side and client-side rendered applications. In addition, Test Lab allows for the collection and analysis of event data, including visualization of the outcome of experiments to help determine whether the specified variation resulted in changes in user behavior.

Test Lab is Dockerized and can be deployed on your virtual private server or AWS Elastic Container Service with one simple command.

Test Lab Use Case

As you saw in the previous sections, there are a range of A/B testing and feature management platforms available, so where does Test Lab fit in?

We think that Test Lab is a great choice for small to mid-sized companies that have at least one developer on their team and are looking for the flexibility to implement either client-side or server-side A/B testing. These companies might be reluctant to give other providers access to their data and would prefer a self-hosted solution, and they may be looking for easy deployment to their virtual private servers. This company may be experiencing enough growth to be interested in making data-driven decisions, but they are not yet collecting their own event data. In essence, they are looking for flexibility, but they do not have the resources to build their own A/B testing solution from scratch.

That's where Test Lab comes in.

The rest of this case study will walk you through the Test Lab architecture and the engineering decisions that we made while building the Test Lab application.