Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By : Michael Gillett
Book Image

Feature Management with LaunchDarkly

By: Michael Gillett

Overview of this book

Over the past few years, DevOps has become the de facto approach for designing, building, and delivering software. Feature management is now extending the DevOps methodology to allow applications to change on demand and run experiments to validate the success of new features. If you want to make feature management happen, LaunchDarkly is the tool for you. This book explains how feature management is key to building modern software systems. Starting with the basics of LaunchDarkly and configuring simple feature flags to turn features on and off, you'll learn how simple functionality can be applied in more powerful ways with percentage-based rollouts, experimentation, and switches. You'll see how feature management can change the way teams work and how large projects, including migrations, are planned. Finally, you'll discover various uses of every part of the tool to gain mastery of LaunchDarkly. This includes tips and tricks for experimentation, identifying groups and segments of users, and investigating and debugging issues with specific users and feature flag evaluations. By the end of the book, you'll have gained a comprehensive understanding of LaunchDarkly, along with knowledge of the adoption of trunk-based development workflows and methods, multi-variant testing, and managing infrastructure changes and migrations.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
5
Section 2:Getting the Most out of Feature Management
11
Section 3: Mastering LaunchDarkly

Chapter 10: Users and Segments

Since we have looked at feature flags in both the broad sense and then in detail in Chapter 3, Basics of LaunchDarkly and Feature Management, and Chapter 9, Feature Flag Management in Depth, respectively, it is now time to explore users and segments in detail. Being able to understand the User object, as well as the functionality that LaunchDarkly provides to target and manage users and groups, is key to being able to make the most of feature management.

While the implementation of a feature flag is simple, with it effectively being an if statement, the real power comes from how you work with users and the targeting within LaunchDarkly. This chapter will give you all the information you need to work confidently with users and maximize the targeting, rollout, and experimentation functionality.

We will look at how to use the LaunchDarkly Software Development Kit (SDK) to set up the User object within an application, as well as some of the optional...