OutPlan

OutPlan is an A/B testing framework based on Facebook's PlanOut. It's designed to work with Node and client-side JavaScript.

OutPlan is based on PlanOut.js, which does all the hard work. Thanks! OutPlan however "outclasses" classic PlanOut by not using classes. The resulting API is clean and simple.

Installation

npm install outplan

Usage

Set up an experiment as follows:

outplan.create("nice-colors", ["A", "B"]);

and then evaluate the experiment using outplan.expose():

var userId = 42; // something unique to the current user
if (outplan.expose("nice-colors", userId) === "A") {
    // Use "A" color variation
} else {
    // Use "B" color variation
}

OutPlan is deterministic so it will always give you the same "A" or "B" for a specific userId.

You can assign complex objects to experiments as well:

outplan.create("cool-buttons", [
    { name: "A", button_color: "#AAA", button_text: "I voted" },
    { name: "B", button_color: "#BBB", button_text: "I am voter" }
]);
var variation = outplan.expose("cool-buttons", userId);
var color = variation.button_color;
var text = variation.button_text;

OutPlan also supports custom distribution operators:

outplan.create("letter-experiment", ["A", "B"], {
    operator: outplan.WeightedChoice,
    weights: [0.6, 0.4],
});

Logging

You can set an event logger using

outplan.configure({
    logFunction: function(e) {
        // ...
    };
};

where e is an object like

{
    event: "exposure",
    name: "cool-buttons",
    inputs: { userId: 42 },
    params: {
        name: "A",
        value: { button_color: "#AAA", button_text: "I voted" }
    },
    time: 1321211
}

Below is an example implementation. It logs events like "cool-buttons - exposure" to some popular analytics services.

function log(e) {
    var label = e.name + " - " + e.event;
 
    // For Mixpanel
    mixpanel.track(label, { variation: e.params.name });
  
    // For Amplitude
    amplitude.logEvent(label, { variation: e.params.name });
    
    // For Heap Analytics
    heap.track(label, { variation: e.params.name });
 
    // For Google Analytics
    ga("send", "event", "EXPERIMENT", label, e.params.name);
}
outplan.configure({ logFunction: log });

Hashing Algorithm

OutPlan uses MD5 for hashing. The underlying Planout.js library can also use SHA1, but it's a bit more heavy-weight for client-side applications. If you want to use SHA1, try the following:

var outplan = require("outplan/dist/outplan_full");
 
// For compatibility with non-JS implementations of PlanOut (even slower):
outplan.configure({ compatibleHash: true });

License

MIT