Effective Feature Management

Chapter 2. Advice from the Front Lines

After your team has decided to take advantage of feature management, it’s easy to get started in small, simple ways. There are certain techniques that you’ll want to keep in mind as you expand your usage and incorporate feature management into your development process to ensure that you realize the maximum benefit.

First Steps with Feature Flags

One of the great things about feature flags is that the cost to try them is extremely low. There’s no need to completely shift development methodologies to incorporate feature flags into your workflow. You can begin with a single flag, demonstrate its value, and introduce flags into your workflow slowly, use case by use case.

Your team can benefit from feature flags regardless of how far along you are in adopting Agile methods. You can use feature flags to release more frequently, even as you are working to modernize the rest of your development methodology. Feature flags don’t require you to have a distributed version control system (DVCS), continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), Kubernetes, service meshes, containerization, serverless, or any other specific technology in place in advance. (Though flags work great in tandem with many of those!) You can begin with feature flags now, no matter what your architecture or deployment cadence is.

If your team is working on adopting modern development practices, feature management can act as a beachhead—a critical first step taken down that ...