# A/B testing & stats plugins?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-b-testing-stats-plugins/156984>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 6, 2009, 5:36am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-b-testing-stats-plugins/156984 "2009-01-06T05:36:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/dbc845/32.png) [@newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/newbee-robert)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2009, 5:36am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-b-testing-stats-plugins/156984/1 "2009-01-06T05:36:12Z")

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Is there nothing like this in the Rails world? I’ve been looking for a  
good testing framework for months, not finding anything, so I’ve just  
been building my own.

This is what I want to do:

- track arbitrary behaviors (e.g. photos viewed, comments posted)
- track correlation between arbitrary variables and those behaviors  
(e.g, how do different versions of this prompt affect average photos  
viewed?)

This kind of thing should be a core part of agile development. What’s  
out there? I know Google Website Optimizer is one of the answers, but it  
seems pretty limited and awkward compared to a Rails-based solution.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/dbc845/32.png) [@newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/newbee-robert)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2009, 10:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-b-testing-stats-plugins/156984/2 "2009-01-06T22:23:23Z")

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You might find this of interest:  
[http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10808](http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10808)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/dbc845/32.png) [@newbee-robert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/newbee-robert)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 5:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-b-testing-stats-plugins/156984/3 "2009-01-07T05:12:52Z")

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Thanks for the link, Steve. It’s clarified what Website Optimizer is  
capable of a little bit, but it still doesn’t cover what I want to test.  
The problem is that it defines conversions as singular events.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to test what I mentioned above. I develop  
Facebook apps, and one of the basic needs is to test how different  
factors affect the number of friends a user invites. I can’t do that  
just based on % who end up on some “success” page.

Any ideas?

Steve R. wrote:

> You might find this of interest:  
> [http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10808](http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=10808)