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

Summary

Being able to target features at the right customers is crucial to the success of feature management and in this chapter, we covered working with users in greater detail than we have thus far. We began by looking at how important it is to understand how to use the User object in the code base to ensure that all the useful data can be used within LaunchDarkly's targeting functionality. Some of this data might be sensitive and LaunchDarkly caters for this data to be used for targeting, but it should not appear within the tool itself for people to view.

Then, we looked at the information that can be seen within LaunchDarkly about the user. This is useful when we want to ensure that all the correct data is coming through for users. More useful, though, is the ability to see each of the flags and which variant is being served to each user. We also looked at how it is possible to set the specific outcome of a flag for individual users.

The final part of this chapter focused...