Microsoft has been quietly building a platform to help its own product teams — and ultimately, those from other companies — turn product planning more of a science and less of a black art.
Microsoft calls the test bed the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (ExP). Here is how the EXP team describes its mission on its Web site:
“The Experimentation Platform enables product groups at Microsoft and later on will enable developers using Windows Live to innovate using controlled experiments with live users. The platform enables testing new ideas quickly using the best-known scientific method for establishing causality between a feature and its effects: randomized experimental design. The basic methodology in controlled experiments is to expose a percentage of users to a new treatment, measure the effect on metrics of interest, and run statistical tests to determine whether the differences are statistically significant, thus establishing causality.â€
Full Article – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1342
