Spotify Introduces Confidence: A New Product for Software Development Teams to Optimize Ideas

Spotify Introduces Confidence: A New Product for Software Development Teams

Spotify is launching a new commercial product called “Confidence” for software development teams. Confidence is built on Spotify’s own experimentation platform and aims to make it easy for teams to set up, run, coordinate, and analyze user tests in order to optimize their ideas quickly. Currently, Confidence is only available as a private beta.

According to a blog post by the company, Spotify has been refining its product testing methods over the years with the help of data scientists and engineers. Their experimentation platform scales best practices and capabilities to all teams, automating simultaneous A/B tests and orchestrating system rollouts across mobile, desktop, and web platforms. Soon, this platform will be accessible to any company that wants to build, test, and iterate ideas with speed, reliability, and confidence.

Spotify states that Confidence is designed to assist software development teams who have outgrown their current testing platform or those looking for a simple way to start A/B testing.

The journey towards Confidence began when a few data scientists and engineers at Spotify started conducting small A/B tests internally in the early 2010s. Despite the tests being manual and error-prone, Spotify recognized the value of experimentation and was determined to improve. Hence, they developed their own basic A/B testing platform named ABBA, which included feature flagging and analysis for standardized metrics. This initiative unlocked numerous experiments throughout the company, expanding from less than 20 experiments per year to hundreds of experiments across multiple squads annually.

Customers can access Confidence in three ways:

1. As a managed service provided by Spotify, accessed through a standalone web service.
2. As a Backstage plugin, integrated into existing infrastructure.
3. By integrating the Confidence platform into their own infrastructure using APIs.

This public release of Spotify’s experimentation platform marks an interesting move for a company primarily recognized as a consumer-facing service. Software development teams can sign up for the waitlist to be eligible for an invite to Confidence. However, no specific timeline has been provided for wider availability of Confidence.