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

How can LaunchDarkly help with trunk-based development?

The chapter has mostly focused on the theory of trunk-based development because it is a way of working rather than a feature of LaunchDarkly. However, there are a couple of ways in which LaunchDarkly can be useful in the context of adding new feature flags and then tidying them up.

LaunchDarkly provides a command-line tool for discovering the references to feature flag keys and where in the code they are implemented. Within LaunchDarkly itself, information about what this tool discovered is presented, including the file where the keys for a flag exist. This information makes it easier to find out whether a flag has been removed from the code base as the tool will no longer find the key in the application. The information from the tool is unable to prove that the application will or won't work in its current state, but it helps identify whether there are any references left to the key. For example, the application might...