Turning off A/B testing in a staging/qa/dev environment is a common requirement to ensure stability and reproducibility during testing. Here’s a general guide on how to disable A/B testing for some popular platforms, including Growthbook.

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Growthbook

Growthbook is designed with flexibility to enable or disable features like A/B testing easily. To turn off A/B testing in a staging environment, you can follow these steps:

1

Configuration

Access the Growthbook admin dashboard and navigate to the configuration settings.

2

Environment Settings

Identify the environment settings specific to your staging environment. Feature Flags: Use feature flags to disable all experiments. You can create a specific feature flag that, when enabled, turns off all experiments in the staging environment. Code Modification: In your application code, check the value of the feature flag before running any experiment logic.

For example:

if (!growthbook.isFeatureEnabled("disableExperiments")) {
    // Run experiment logic
}
3

Environment Settings

Save your changes and deploy them to the staging environment. Make sure your staging environment configuration does not pull production experiment configurations.

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Optimizely

Optimizely allows you to manage experiments across different environments:

1

Environment Setup

Log into your Optimizely dashboard and go to the environment settings.

2

Toggle Off Experiments

For the staging environment, you can toggle off all experiments manually or adjust the configuration to not run any experiments.

3

SDK Setup

Adjust the SDK initialization in your staging environment to either not include any active experiments or to ignore them. For example:

const optimizely = createInstance({
  sdkKey: "your_staging_sdk_key",
  datafileOptions: {
    autoUpdate: false,
    updateInterval: 0, // disable auto-fetching of datafile
  }
});