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Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. Theoretically, teams can engage in all four pillars of feature management without relying on a dedicated feature management tool. In many cases, engineers will construct a patchwork solution for feature flag management in-house. Some organizations, however, do build and use world-class homegrown systems. But in our experience, the latter is the exception. Unsurprisingly, LaunchDarkly contends that, in the long-run, a commercial feature management platform is more affordable, sustainable, and painless than the alternative. You can explore the pros and cons of building vs. buying a feature management solution here . ...

What is Operate? Operate, the second of the Four Pillars of Feature Management, encompasses feature flag use cases that improve the operational health of your application. It entails making feature flags a mission-critical piece of your operations. As deployment speeds and infrastructural complexity go up, so does the need for operational safeguards. Feature management is that safeguard. Teams that use feature flags via a feature management platform reduce risk and ensure customers remain satisfied with their service. They dramatically cut down on serious incidents. For example, as previously cited, Honeycomb has a “change fail rate” of just 0.1% , a feat shared only by the world’s most elite software teams. And the company cites its use of LaunchDarkly as a big reason for its exceedingly low failure rate. ...

What is feature management? Feature management is a new class of software development tools and techniques powered by feature flags. A feature flag is a lever of control within your code (an if-else statement) that decouples code deployments from feature releases. Developers have used some variation of feature flags for years. But when it comes to enjoying the full benefits of feature flags, many have only scratched the surface. At most organizations, the art of feature flagging is confined to just a few teams across a few use cases. Such limits stem, in part, from the fact that managing feature flags at scale is quite challenging. For one thing, technical debt can rapidly accrue if you start using flags in large volumes. As a result, only a handful of developers end up using them, thus limiting the value an organization can capture from those flags (see what we did there?). Another drawback of conventional flags is they only support basic true-false, or Boolean, use cases. This, too, prevents organizations from realizing the full benefits of feature flags. ...