Continuous Experiment Definition Characteristics

The definition of an experiment is a fundamental artifact of continuous experiments. It is used to formalize ideas as a plan of action and to document attained knowledge. Although there is a large body of research on continuous experimentation, the definition of experiments is not researched sufficiently. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of characteristics of continuous experiment definitions. The taxonomy is synthesized from a systematic literature review and a tool review of experimentation platforms. Our findings show amongst others that there are 17 characteristics of experiment definitions. Moreover, that platforms primarily focus on the execution of experiments and that experimentation is more than the execution of an experiment.