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xLab: enable changes in traffic allocation during active experiments
Closed, ResolvedPublic5 Estimated Story Points

Description

Background

Originally ACs for T396059: xLab: update validation for traffic per wiki for Experiments, we decided to spin this feature into its own ticket given the product and analytics impacts of allowing for changes in traffic during an active experiment. We've also cut scope to only include changing (increasing only) sampling rate/traffic allocation -- not including additional wikis.

Why? Traffic increases mean that we will be randomly sampling more of the same selected population. Adding new wikis introduces new populations, and that requires specific statistical and analytical approaches. GrowthBook will allow us to support that in the future, so we don't want to build it today.

Description

Add new validation rules to xLab experiments form:

  • Allow for increase of sample rates for targeted wikis in activated experiments – Initial design specs
  • Disallow changing wikis for experiments - no adding of wikis
  • Prohibit destructive changes to traffic size and target wikis while an experiment is active (i.e. no decrease of sample rates and no removal of wikis)
  • For Instruments: allow increasing or decreasing traffic size and adding and removing wikis

Acceptance Criteria

Details

Related Changes in Gerrit:
Related Changes in GitLab:
TitleReferenceAuthorSource BranchDest Branch
Enable changes in traffic allocation during active experimentsrepos/data-engineering/mpic!265sfaciT396650-enable-traffic-changesmain
Customize query in GitLab

Event Timeline

noting here that this ticket may be invalid/irrelevant given near future integration with GrowthBook which handles phased rollouts in its model

JVanderhoop-WMF renamed this task from xLab: enable changes in traffic during active experiments to xLab: enable changes in traffic allocation during active experiments.Jun 16 2025, 5:56 PM
JVanderhoop-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.
JVanderhoop-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)

Are there any news on this task? I'm wondering whether we should exclude this effort from SDS2.4.13's scope. We're at the end of the current FY, and this would block wrapping up that hypothesis in the next few weeks (we're already off-track).

This task's parent Epic was resolved coinciding with the conclusion of hypothesis SDS2.4.13 at the end of FY24-25. This pending subtask can be considered foundational/essential work now, and until w decide whether it should be housed under a particular KR.

JVanderhoop-WMF raised the priority of this task from Medium to High.Aug 25 2025, 3:28 PM
JVanderhoop-WMF moved this task from Incoming to READY TO GROOM on the Experimentation Lab board.

Two teams that have onboarded on to the platform have wanted to increase traffic to their selected wikis - the first because they wanted to ensure they weren't breaking enwiki, the second because they were worried about having too few users enrolled in their experiment. Right now, validation rules prohibit this action, so they have to go through our engineers, who have to update sql queries in prod (not ideal).

Let's increase the priority of this work, given we are hearing the requests and are not opposed to our teams making these types of changes.

Milimetric updated the task description. (Show Details)
Milimetric set the point value for this task to 5.
Milimetric moved this task from READY TO GROOM to Backlog on the Experimentation Lab board.

Change #1199228 had a related patch set uploaded (by Santiago Faci; author: Santiago Faci):

[operations/deployment-charts@master] xLab: Deploying v1.1.0 release to staging

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1199228

Change #1199228 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/deployment-charts@master] xLab: Deploying v1.1.0 release to staging

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1199228

Change #1199733 had a related patch set uploaded (by Santiago Faci; author: Santiago Faci):

[operations/deployment-charts@master] xLab: Deploying v1.1.0 release to production

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1199733

Change #1199733 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/deployment-charts@master] xLab: Deploying v1.1.0 release to production

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1199733