Announcing Free Experimentation and Targeted Rollouts for Developers and Product Teams

 We’ve seen thousands of teams create feature flags with Rollouts across websites, mobile apps, and backend experiences. However, we believe that smarter software delivery isn’t just about reducing risk, it’s also about delivering value. So we’re excited to announce that we’re adding two key features from our paid Full Stack plans – experimentation and feature configuration – into our free Rollouts plan for Full Stack. Product and development teams can run one concurrent experiment at a time to prove the value of the features they are building and remotely update their apps on the fly with feature configurations. Finally, we’re releasing targeted rollouts, a more granular way to release new features with the ability to specify different percentages of traffic by audience and development environment, available today as a beta.

Measuring Value with Experimentation

One of the tried and true ways to verify that your software is delivering value is to use A/B testing to rigorously measure the impact of different product decisions. Product development teams can now test different versions of their features to measure the impact on their core product and application metrics using the same Stats Engine technology that is part of our paid enterprise plans. One of our enterprise customers, StubHub, uses Optimizely Full Stack to test different versions of their pricing suggestions for ticket sellers to increase revenue and product adoption. This same powerful technology is now available to a much wider audience by adding it to our free Rollouts plan, so development teams can easily use data to move fast with confidence and deliver what customers want.

Real-time experiment results powered by Optimizely Stats Engine

Adding Feature Configuration to Help Developers Remotely Configure Their Apps

Deploying code every time a team wants to experiment on or update a feature can be time-consuming. So we’ve added feature configuration, a feature previously only in paid Optimizely Full Stack plans, to the new Rollouts plan. Feature configuration includes variables that can be parameterized and remotely configured from the Optimizely dashboard without deploying code. By instrumenting variables upfront when developing a feature, teams can update or test many permutations of the feature without having to redeploy or write new code. For instance, a mobile developer working on a food delivery app that’s developing a new “no-touch” delivery option, can add variables to their “no-touch” feature called “title” and “description” which would enable them to update how they message this new feature in multiple places in their app. 

Remotely configure and updates features with Optimizely

Targeted Rollouts Provides More Granular Control Over Your Feature Releases

Targeted rollouts is releasing in public beta today for all new free Rollouts accounts and will be rolling out to existing free and paid Full Stack accounts over the summer. With targeted rollouts, you can control your feature rollouts by audience and development environment. For instance, a B2B software team could progressively roll out a new feature to 100% of users on their free plan, 25% of users on business tier plan, and 10% of their enterprise tier plan. They can also specify different configurations in developer and pre-production environments, ensuring that new functionality gets the right visibility during the development process. 

Rolling out a feature to different percentages of plans tiers using targeted rollouts

Continuing to Invest in Developer Experience

We’re continuously working on making our platform more developer-friendly by adding out of the box support for service-oriented architectures with Optimizely Agent, searchable change history, additional SDKs for languages like Go and React, and IDE integrations for IntelliJ and VSCode. We also recently launched a new Slack developer community to let developers connect with other developers about feature flags, progressive delivery, and experimentation.

IntelliJ Optimizely IDE Integration

Get Started

1. Create your Rollouts account to start shipping faster and proving value with less risk.
2. Existing Rollouts users will see an experiments tab when you log in today. 
3. Optimizely Web users can add the Rollouts plan to your account by going to the following link.
4. Join our Slack developer community to ask questions and share best practices.