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

This chapter examined how LaunchDarkly can help teams understand how flags, users, and experiments are working and provide a view of all the changes. Neither the Debugger nor the Audit log is necessary for feature management, but both make the experience of working with feature management and LaunchDarkly easier.

With the Debugger, development teams can gain insights into how the LaunchDarkly SDK is working with the data provided. This can speed up the process of identifying implementation or configuration issues, as the Debugger will show you whether things were not working as expected. This is a more effective way of discovering something is wrong than just trying to discover this from the application logs themselves. With the ability to view both summary information and enable debug data, teams can gain as much information from the SDK's Debugger as needed.

Throughout this book, feature management has been shown to extend the practices of modern software delivery...