In my org, I think I’ve go the feature flag thing mostly down.
We started with a customer specific configuration system that allows arbitrary values matching a defined schema. It’s very easy to add to the schema (define the config name, types, and permissions to read or write it in a JSON schema document).
We have an administration panel with a full view of the JSON config for our support specialist and and even more detailed one for developers.
Most config values get a user interface as well.
From there we just have a namespace in the configuration for “feature flags”. Sometimes these are very short lived (2-4 sprints until the feature is done), but others can last a lot longer.
There are an unfortunate couple that will probably never go away at this point (because of some enterprise customer with a niche use case in the “legacy” version of the feature that we’ve not yet implemented compatibility with and I don’t know when it will get on our roadmap to do so), but in the end they can just be migrated into normal config values if needed.
A little tooling layer on top lets us query and write to the configs of thousands of sites at once as well.
Comments
Thank you for this great list of the immense business value derived from "misusing" feature flags!
In my org, I think I’ve go the feature flag thing mostly down.
We started with a customer specific configuration system that allows arbitrary values matching a defined schema. It’s very easy to add to the schema (define the config name, types, and permissions to read or write it in a JSON schema document).
We have an administration panel with a full view of the JSON config for our support specialist and and even more detailed one for developers.
Most config values get a user interface as well.
From there we just have a namespace in the configuration for “feature flags”. Sometimes these are very short lived (2-4 sprints until the feature is done), but others can last a lot longer.
There are an unfortunate couple that will probably never go away at this point (because of some enterprise customer with a niche use case in the “legacy” version of the feature that we’ve not yet implemented compatibility with and I don’t know when it will get on our roadmap to do so), but in the end they can just be migrated into normal config values if needed.
A little tooling layer on top lets us query and write to the configs of thousands of sites at once as well.