Yelp: Bunsen lets us test products at scale

Yelp runs hundreds of experiments to ensure new features within its apps and website remain aligned with key business metrics. To launch, manage, and analyze the results of these experiments, the company's employees use Bunsen, a proprietary platform developed just under two years ago. During an interview on Wednesday at VentureBeat's Transform summit, Justin Norman, head of data science at Yelp, explained that Bunsen was born out of necessity. Historically, Yelp engineers themselves were responsible for experimentation, which meant they had to write custom code to compare the performance of different versions of products. As the company's portfolio grew over the years, this piecemeal approach became inefficient and expensive.