Design and Implementation of a Prototype Tool for Continuous Experimentation

In the new era of digital economy, agility and the ability to adapt to market changes and customers' needs is crucial for sustainable competitiveness. It is vital to identify and consider customers' and users' needs in order to make fact-driven decisions and evaluate assumptions and hypotheses before actually allocating resources to them. Understanding the customers' needs and delivering valuable products or services based on deep customer insight, demands Continuous Experimentation. Continuous Experimentation refers to collecting customers' and users' feedback constantly and understand the real value of product and services to test new ideas and hypothesis as early as possible with minimum resource allocation. Experimentation requires a technical infrastructure including tools, methods, processes, interfaces and APIs to collect, store, visualize and analyze the data. This thesis analyses the state of the practice and state of the art regarding current tools with functionalities that support or might support continuous experimentation. The results of this analysis is a set of problems identified for current tools as well as a set of requirements to be fulfilled for tackling those problems. Among the problems, customizability of the tools to meet the needs of different companies and scenarios is of utmost importance. The lack of customizability in current tools offered companies to allocate their resources to develop their own proprietary tools tailored for their custom needs. Based on requirements that support better customizability, a prototype tool that supports continuous experimentation has been designed and implemented. The support of the tool is evaluated in a real-world scenario with respect to the requirements and customizability issue