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 11: Experiments

When the concept of feature management was introduced in the first section of this book, we stated that it was not a new concept. Using simple techniques such as changing a config file, we can turn a feature on or off. This is the traditional version of feature management, which is like a switch that enables or disables functionality for all users at once. However, with the modern functionality of feature management platforms such as LaunchDarkly, feature management can be used to concurrently serve different experiences to customers.

This ability to offer users different experiences at the same time provides us with the opportunity to experiment with customers to refine the features, journeys, and systems that are used within a product. By collecting data from the customers' usage of the product, insight can be gained into which implementations perform best for the business. This helps us find the one variant that is the most successful. This insight...