Continuous-Delivery

What is Build? The Build pillar addresses the use of feature flags for building and delivering new features, bug fixes, and code changes of any kind. While much of this category deals with release management, we’ve named it “Build” because of the critical role feature flags also play in pre-release activities. Such activities might include trunk-based development, testing in production, and rollout planning. Traditional software development is reactive: teams push code and pray things go well. Build offers a proactive approach, wherein developers test features in production and collect user feedback before a release. This implies making feature flags an essential part of your release strategy. ...

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 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. ...