A/B testing is gaining attention in the automotive sector as a promising tool to measure casual effects from software changes. Different from the web-facing businesses, where A/B testing has been well-established, the automotive domain often suffers from limited eligible users to participate in online experiments. To address this shortcoming, we present a method for designing balanced control and treatment groups so that sound conclusions can be drawn from experiments with considerably small sample sizes. While the Balance Match Weighted method has been used in other domains such as medicine, this is the first paper to apply and evaluate it in the context of software development. Furthermore, we describe the Balance Match Weighted method in detail and we conduct a case study together with an automotive manufacturer to apply the group design method in a fleet of vehicles. Finally, we present our case study in the automotive software engineering domain, as well as a discussion on the benefits and limitations of the A/B group design method.
翻译:在汽车部门,A/B测试作为衡量软件变化产生的临时效应的有希望的工具,日益受到注意。不同于在网上进行A/B测试的企业,汽车领域往往有有限的合格用户参加在线实验。为解决这一缺陷,我们提出了一个设计平衡控制和处理小组的方法,以便从抽样规模相当小的试验中得出正确的结论。虽然平衡匹配加权方法已在医学等其他领域使用,但这是在软件开发方面应用和评价该方法的第一份文件。此外,我们详细介绍了平衡匹配方法,并与汽车制造商一起进行案例研究,在车辆车队中应用集体设计方法。最后,我们介绍了汽车软件工程领域的案例研究,并讨论了A/B组设计方法的利弊和局限性。