Adding control to your busy release schedule

Feature controls are a method by which you can control and toggle on or off individual features in your application. Martin fowler has a great article on the benefits of them here, but the deadline is looming, the backlog is busting and you have no time to think about lunch or dinner, let alone adding in some ‘luxurious’ feature control to your application ‘I don’t have a story for that — and theres no room in the backlog to add it’.

Release night comes, the 10 features your dev team have carefully jammed into the release get sent flying into production, after all you have awesome CI and Test.. so it should be good.. what can go wrong?

Outcome 1:

1 of your 20 features fail. Everyone groans. A developer frantically tries to fudge in a fix. You might succeed, otherwise its rollback time. Beers are cancelled, everyone is sad.

Outcome 2

All of your 20 features go in — hooray! They are all live. You scramble to get comms to customers, your clientele hate 5 of them. You see a drop off in engagement, quick — get the dev team to patch it and re-release next week.

Either way your already busy schedule gets busier — and costlier, in man-hours and reputation. At this point adding better control over your features seems like less of a luxury item and more of a real prerequisite to help prevent rollback and additional developer release effort.


So how to fit control into your busy release?

  1. Treat your features — and the management of your features as a first class citizen. First you need buy-in — discuss in your planning meeting if you want to manage and target the release of a new feature between the developers and product owners.
  2. Include adding a feature control for your feature in the story estimate, not as an additional task but right in with the story — using featureflow its only a single line of code in most instances, the overhead is minimal.
  3. Decide how you may want to roll out and target your new feature. By user roll, percentage, user or just a simple on/off — again get this into the development plan.
  4. Do not roll-your-own solution. This could take months. Instead use a hosted service such as featureflow to give you simple and powerful control in minutes.
  5. Allow time to maintain, remove and clean up old non-permanent features and feature controls. Ensure you keep your application manageable by keeping only the features you actually want to control. Featureflow can help prompt you to remove non-permanent feature controls.

Want to get started ? Grab a free account at www.featureflow.io

Featureflow

Notes from the development team at featureflow.io

Oliver Oldfield-Hodge

Written by

Featureflow

Notes from the development team at featureflow.io

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