Having Release nightmares? Try Feature Flags

Have you ever been curious about adding a new feature to your app but been reluctant to do so out of concern about breaking something already in place? Perhaps you wanted to try out a new version of your code with a small group of people before releasing a major update to everyone. Maybe you simply wanted to play around with some new ideas for the sake of novelty without damaging anything in the process.

If you responded “yes” to any of these questions, then feature flags are something you should look into.

To enable or disable certain pieces of code at runtime without modifying or redeploying the whole system, feature flags are a simple but effective solution. They function much like switches in that they alter the way your features seem and act depending on the user or circumstance.

Are releases different from deployments?

In the past, releasing meant just deploying the code to the production environment; hence, the two terms were interchangeable. This meant that there were substantial dangers to the running program with each new deployment. Teams might release numerous features at once, once a month, or once every three months to spread out the risk. This, however, greatly increased the stakes of a deployment and required rolling back the whole packaged version if even a single feature failed in production, drastically slowing down the pace of development teams.

By separating deployment and release, as with the help of feature flags, new code may be included in a production deployment without being deployed. For many reasons, this has the potential to significantly alter the ways in which development teams do their work.

Change the way you make your branches

There is no longer a need to maintain multiple long-lived feature branches. Whether you use GitHub, GitLab, or some other solution for your CD pipeline, long-lived branches are frequently the cause of complex merge conflicts that can result in difficult-to-debug issues. Trunk-based development is a practice in which the development teams all work in the main branch and/or frequently merge short lived branches. This not only removes the complexity of merges, but also enables teams to move faster by allowing them to deploy code changes continuously.

Take charge of the product’s evolution

Teams may manage the whole feature lifecycle by limiting access to just those who need it. For beta testing and user input before a feature’s public release, a feature flag might restrict its usage to a select group of people. Or, if no deployment or technical involvement is necessary, a release might be scheduled to coincide with a marketing campaign. You can confidently launch your campaign, knowing that a hiccup won't jeopardize the success of your feature rollout.

Think of release minus stress. Awesome right?

By decreasing the mean time to remediate (a crucial statistic for DORA), feature flags alleviate stress during release cycles. If a feature is creating issues, turning off the flag will deactivate it, resolving the issue quickly and eliminating the need to revert a complicated release that may include numerous essential features or fixes. Teams may spot issues sooner and mitigate their effect by using feature flags to allow Progressive Delivery, in which a feature is incrementally delivered to larger populations of users to ensure that it operates as planned.

Why should I use feature flags?

Release features better.

Flags are often used in build and feature release processes. Release management includes early access, canary, and beta programs, which offer select people access to features before releasing them to everyone. Starting small and expanding helps:

• Watch how systems and services react under demand.
• Use user input to make adjustments.
• Limit the blast radius if anything goes wrong.

Effectiveness in operations

To reduce the severity of an event, feature flags may be used to selectively enable or disable a function of the system. You can do the following using functional feature flags:

• If a feature’s implementation is having a detrimental effect on the user experience and warnings are being generated, it may be turned off automatically or manually through circuit breakers or kill switches.
• Reducing the number of API calls will increase dependability.
• If a page is experiencing significant traffic, try switching to a stripped-down version.
• Interoperability testing of new microservices or third-party dependencies requires live migration testing.
• Set debug logging levels dynamically.

Experiment-based learning

While monitoring and observability tools may alert you to any malfunctions in your system, they cannot tell you whether or not the feature you designed is the proper one. To make sure you’re releasing the right feature, experimentation or A/B testing may shed light on questions like how people are interacting with it and whether or not it’s functioning as expected.

You may use feature flags to verify or refute your assumptions by trying out various feature settings. To guarantee that you are releasing the most optimized version of a product that positively affects corporate KPIs, experiments provide concrete reporting and real-world measures. Since experimentation is so difficult to set up, a feature flag service or feature management platform is usually necessary.

It’s not all roses.

There are several advantages to using feature flags in software development, as we’ve shown. However, if a team begins to rely more and more on them, they may accumulate technical debt known as flag debt. When a new feature is released to all users, it’s common for developers to accumulate “flag debt,” which consists of obsolete flags and other bits of code.

Teams have a few options for dealing with flag debt. The first step is to give each flag a descriptive name that conveys its function. Analytics provided by feature flag platforms and services may be used to verify whether a flag is still active. It is recommended that development teams with widespread use of feature flags set aside time once a month or once every three months to remove unused flags.

As you can see, feature flags are awesome! They let you have more control and flexibility over your code, and enable you to deliver value faster and safer. They also make coding more fun and creative, as you can experiment with different ideas and scenarios without fear.

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