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What are Feature Flags (or Feature Toggles)? How do they work? Why they are important?
Feature Flags are a super important tool to use in your application, but many are still confused about them
This is why I put together a video with a simple explanation on how Feature Flags work, how to implement them, and what benefits they bring.
⏲️ The overall outline of the video is:
- What are Feature Flags
- Release vs Deployment
- Feature Flag Implementation theory
- Continuous Experimentation
- Platforms with Feature Flags
- Controlling Feature Flags
- Recap
- Final Considerations
Enjoy the watch!
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/c8KgKTgyFUE
What do you think of it? How do you plan to use or already use Feature Flags? Any more questions about this topic?
Let me know in the comment section below.
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Top comments (4)
Thanks for your post.
Do you think the use of feature flags is too invasive and may affect the normal operation of the program?
When I promote feature flags to clients, this is the question that get used the most.
What do you think about Launchdarkly's Code reference feature? Would a code analysis tool to help solve unexpected failures caused by Feature flag be useful?
Hey, those are good questions.
FF shouldn't be invasive, and should not affect the normal operations. Of course, they need to be used wisely and cleaned up every once in a while to remove the ones that are not neccessary anymore (for example, already turned ON and with no paln to roll them back OFF) and the related code. A good practice for this is having a "shared calendar" in your ALM tool in which every developer can see which FF are currently added to the software, and when to remove them (of course it should be keep up-to-date), and make that as part as your sprint as well
I've actually never used it, so I cannot talk "by experience", but it seems ok. Useful to keep track of your FF in a semi-automated way
Not sure about what you mean by unexpected failures caused by Feature flag but I don't think any code analysis tool have an out-of-the-box feature fot this (at least, I've never seen one personally, I may be wrong). FFF should not cause any unexpected failure per se, a good FF management system and implementation should always have a fallback strategy. For example, if you rely on a 3rd party system for evaluating the status of your FF, like App Config or LaunchDarkly, you should design your FF to be able to evaluate to a default state (either on or off) in case your software is unable to reach said service
Great video! Hard concept to explain to many.
Thanks! Glad you found it helpful