On heavy-user bias in A/B testing

Abstract

On-line experimentation (also known as A/B testing) has become an integral part of software development. To timely incorporate user feedback and continuously improve products, many software companies have adopted the culture of agile deployment, requiring online experiments to be conducted and concluded on limited sets of users for a short period. While conceptually efficient, the result observed during the experiment duration can deviate from what is seen after the feature deployment, which makes the A/B test result biased. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis to show that heavy-users can contribute significantly to the bias, and propose a re-sampling estimator for bias adjustment.