simple_split – dead simple A/B testing on Rails

The simple_split gem provides the absolute simplest possible support for split testing with Rails that could possibly exist. More feature-complete solutions like split provide more bells and whistles, but they also do far more than necessary for simple split testing with good analytics services.

Instead, simple_split is bare-bones while still supporting flexible testing.

• Supports weighted variations
• Does not require the use of any data store
• Variations already seen by users are tracked via cookies

Quick Start

Add gem 'simple_split' to your Gemfile, then run bundle. That's it. Now you can start adding split testing support to your project.

All classes that inherit from ActionView or ActionController have access to the ab_test method. It accepts an experiment name and a list of variations.

ab_test 'experiment_name', 'variation_a', 'variation_b', 'variation_c'

The result of a call to ab_test is a randomly selected variation. If a user has already seen a particular variation, that variation will always be returned instead of randomly selecting one.

Weights can be specified using a hash.

ab_test 'experiment_name', { 'variation_a' => 1.0, 'variation_b' => 0.2 }

Credit

This was inspired by the simple_abs gem, which was already quite stripped-down, but it didn't quite suit my needs.