Discussion on: Fun with Feature Flags

I think this is an important topic that is easy to ... well, just not know about!

Thanks for adding this topic to your collection of posts!

Launching new features "darkly" (code is in the app, but a feature flag has it turned off) will allow teams to continue to keep code merging into master, deploying, running tests on new code without requiring it to be fully completed.

One thing I would add is (and I realize you aren't recommending this practice - you just wrote some example code) is to move the Feature Flag logic out of a static global class.

Those static helper classes aren't testable and are often directly tied to volatile dependencies (ex: database, file system, app-settings.json/AppSettings.config).

Instead either supply a feature service behind an interface:

public interface IFeatureService
{
   bool IsFeatureEnabled(string featureName);
}

// or ...

public interface IFeatureService
{
   bool IsFeatureEnabled<TContext>(TContext featureContext);
}

Where you can abstract away logic to determine if the feature is enabled by checking an API, database, or environment configuration.

This approach is helpful when features need to be dynamic based on the execution context (ex: not the same for every user).

The other option is to create very specific feature 'configuration' classes that are populated in your composition root when using Inversion of Control and a Dependency Injection container.

public class UserDiscountFeature
{
    public bool IsEnabled { get; }

    public UserDiscountFeature(bool isEnabled)
    {
        IsEnabled = isEnabled;
    }
}

These can be populated per-request or as a singleton for the lifetime of the app, but they tend to not change often.

For example, the feature is off today, but we update the configuration value in the database tomorrow, and then it's on for everyone.

ASP.NET Core has feature management baked in, so the patterns are established - we just have to choose our implementation!