Patent ID: 8010401

Claim:
A method of gathering research associated with a product comprising: distributing the product to a group of users in a market resulting in a distributed product, wherein the distributed product comprises a first standard feature and a first test feature, and wherein each copy of the distributed product has a corresponding license number; hashing the license number of each copy of the distributed product to generate a plurality of selection keys; selecting, by one or more processors of a computer system, a subset of selection keys from the plurality of selection keys based on a policy defining a size of a first test group; identifying the first test group from the group of users based on the subset of selection keys; enabling, by the one or more processors, the first test feature only in the first test group remotely via a network; gathering, by the one or more processors, first usage data associated with the enabled first test feature from the first test group; and evaluating, by the one or more processors, the enabled first test feature based on the first usage data to obtain a test result.