The San Francisco Java User Group

The oldest recorded randomized controlled trial was conducted in 1747, almost two centuries before the systematic mathematical apparatus for analyzing such trials was developed. At present, the explosion of Internet based interactive applications provides unique opportunity to validate product ideas using the same technique. While the bellwethers like Amazon and Google have employed experimentation from day one, most regular enterprises are only now realizing the benefits of and the challenges associated with building performant experimentation practices. Variant is an early stage startup with a novel product in the space, which takes an original approach to instrumentation of controlled experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests), featuring direct integration with operational data, negligible runtime overhead, elegant APIs, advanced experience concurrency, and low cost per experiment. At this time, we only offer a Java client SDK, others in the early stages of development. We will cover Variant's Experience Definition Model (XDM), consider typical use cases, including the special case of feature toggles, and review the demo application, which is based on the Spring MVC Petclinic demo. Bio: Igor Urisman is the founder and CEO of Variant. His other work includes the custom experimentation framework at LendingClub [masked]), contributions to the early releases of Veridata at GoldenGate Software [masked]), and the inception and initial development of the MaxL language for the Essbase OLAP server [masked]). He holds a MS degree in Mathematics from Kharkiv State University, Ukraine.