Siim Viidu

Interesting post and paper on AB goals and targets.

Few quick points on the subject

Understand that long-term goals do not always align with short-term metrics. 

"Success" in your test may be just an instrumentation difference.

Primacy effect occurs when you change the navigation on a web site, and experienced users may be less efficient until they get used to the new navigation, thus giving an inherent advantage to the Control. Conversely, when a new design or feature is introduced, some users will investigate the new feature, click everywhere, and thus introduce a "novelty" bias that dies quickly if the feature is not truly useful. 

ThoughtWorks continues to map the latest technology trends.

Quick look what is hot and what is not. The overall theme appears to be around addressing scale and also massively growing mobile/web/tablet applications.

Techniques

Increasing use of agile in DWH, BI and Analytics - real time data transfer over batch based approach

Continuous Delivery, single command deploy, improved testing and performance testing becoming norm 

Simple application health status pages and systems at each app/node level with key metrics embedded

Tools

Polyglot persistence - basically store data in various data stores based on use (eg no longer rely on a single RDBMS)

Infrastructure change and config treated as code (release practices, source control)

Platforms

Single threaded servers with asynchronous I/O - like node.js

Hybrid cloud solutions (mix of public cloud and private data center). AWS gets thumbs up as a general recommendation. 

RIA tech (eg Flash) falling out of favour more and more.

Languages

JavaScript is now established as a powerful, mainstream language with a vibrant community and lots of tools being made available