Drupal GovCon 2024: LaunchDarkly and Drupal: A Solid Combo For A/B Testing

During Drupal GovCon this year, I presented a session on A/B testing. The session covered the basics of A/B testing and specifically delved into A/B testing on Drupal sites with LaunchDarkly.

Why A/B Test?

A/B tests are excellent tools because they allow us to compare two or more variations of something simultaneously and measure how well those variations perform. This means we can make a change to a site and only show it to a subset of users. Then, we can measure its impact to see whether we should completely implement it or leave things the way they were.

Why LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag SaaS (software as a service) that also has a framework for A/B testing called Experiments. The reason LaunchDarkly is a great service for this is because it:

1. offers a FedRAMP-authorized federal instance, which is great for government clients.
2. comes with A/B testing out of the box
3. has a very large number of supported languages and integrations
4. can show updates in real-time when using its client-side SDKs
5. takes privacy and security very seriously

A Bit of Code

Getting feature flags needed for LaunchDarkly Experiments to work in a Drupal codebase is relatively pain-free. You need to install the SDK provided by LaunchDarkly, which can be done via Composer. Then, it’s about 20 lines of JavaScript code to initialize the client and start evaluating flags. Then, it’s up to you to decide what to do once those flags have been evaluated.

My Drupal GovCon Experience

I wouldn’t hesitate to present at Drupal GovCon again if I get the chance. Not only was it great to share my experience with all of the attendees and the people who watched the video afterward, but it was also so enlightening to see all of the other sessions while I was there.

A session by Samira Sadat and Ray Estrada, which showed me the work that went into translating Vote.gov, was particularly interesting for me as I’ve also spent some time recently with the translation of content. There were sessions that gave me tools that I can see myself using on my own projects, like the one by Christian Burk and Steve Wirt, which talked about making alterations to very large amounts of content and the module they contributed to help with those kinds of operations. I also saw some great sessions, like Martin Anderson-Clutz’s session on Drupal’s new Recipes feature, which showed how it will help make things so much easier for site builders.

These sessions have made me very excited and hopeful for Drupal's future. I’ve learned more about what Drupal can do to impact government websites and applications. This conference has also shown me the Drupal GovCon community's impact on the people who use those websites and applications.