Reloading parameters

[MklBst]

What about updates ? does google store knows about our updates and proposes them?

[wehlutyk]

App updates? Yes, the Play Store app will automatically update the app whenever we publish a new version (unless the user explicitly asked it not to). This is parallel (different) to parameters updates.

Does that answer the question?

[MklBst]

Yes. So if at some point we really really want to change the questions, we release a new version?

[wehlutyk]

Oh I get it now.

As it is now, updating the app won't reset its data, so the experiment will keep running with the same questions the user had before.

But: if we really want to change the questions, we can push an app update that we programmed to go and fetch new questions.

Another way to do this, is to create another type of parameter file, which tells the app what it should do depending on which parameter version it has. It would be like:

3-production-XXXX: ok
3-production-YYYY: update (to latest, which could be 3-production-ZZZZ)
...

Something like that. Then, each time the app connects to internet, it checks if it should update its parameters.

What kind of updates are you thinking of? This needs to be thought up a little.

[MklBst]

Well this sounds great. I hope we won't need to change anything after we got feedback from the beta users. But it's just to make sure that updates are smooth and taken into account for everybody at the same time - and not have some subjects that do a worse version because they downloaded two days before than the others.
Hence what kind of updates?

• nothing fancy: just wording, add/remove questions, etc. that we may need to do at some point for any reason. Again, hope we don't need it, but it's nice to have this possibility in a way that does not requires uninstall and reinstall the app!

[vincentadam87]

I think you are very optimistic @MklBst . ( @jsackuratens )

The experiment is not gonna work from scratch,
You will have to change the versions frequently and have people running the app with different versions in parallel (during beta and during the main thing)

When you do an experiment in the lab, you have multiple pilots, this is even more critical with an app like this one where feedback is also on ergonomy, annoyance level etc , and also feedback is delayed: you only know later if people drop after a week or so.

The launching will require a tight and precise schedule of updates and versioning and we should discuss that in great details.

This is really important if we want a successful launch.
The app world is severe, a bad start, bad early support, bad "customer" management, not meeting expectation with the results -> you get bad marks and the app is dead.

Those are all things you don't care about in normal lab experiment but that become critical here.

[wehlutyk]

We're going to use a branching scheme.

[wehlutyk]

But this is not urgent, so we'll keep for if we want a big number of subjects.

[wehlutyk]

Closing, the branching scheme to do is in #340.