Agile software teams want to move faster and deliver features to end users faster. However, pushing faster and more often usually means more risk of breaking and downtime. Feature flags, gating features and being able to quickly reverse them enables development teams to ship more frequently. With feature flags, engineering changes are pushed live to production “off”, and then turned on to different users. Feature flags allow developers to separate deployment from rollout, enabling the ability to quickly throttle features for different users segments. In this talk, you'll learn how you can use feature flags for opt-in early access, private beta, canary launches and dark releases.

1. Faster & Less Risky Releases
With Feature Flags!
Edith Harbaugh
@LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly.com

2. Edith Harbaugh
• Cofounder & CEO, LaunchDarkly
• Podcast cohost, “To Be Continuous”
• Engineering, Epicentric & Vignette
• Product, Monster.com, EasyBloom, TripIt
• Marketing, Concur
• BS Engineering Harvey Mudd College

3. Tsunami Software Releases

4. Feature Flags

5. Feature Flags!
• Push functionality to who you want,
when you want
• Expand or roll back, without a new
deployment
• Separate code deployment from
business logic
• Get real-world feedback and analytics

6. No long lived branches

7. Kill Your Staging Server
Developer
Environments
QA STAGING PRODUCTION

8. Use Feature Flags to expose
functionality when you want, to
who you want

9. Early Access Betas

10. Opt-In

11. Block

12. Rollouts

13. Hypothesis Driven Development

14. Newbie > Power User

15. Subscription

16. Sunset

17. Best Practices for Feature Flagging
• What’s
the
right
level
of
flagging?
• Ambiguously
named
flags
• Misunderstood
flags
• Removing
flags
• Control
access
to
flags
• Visibility
to
non-­‐technical
users
• Logging
• Dependent
flags

18. edith@launchdarkly.com
@Edith_H
@continuousCast