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

An introduction to a feature and how it works

Feature management is a simple idea to explain, but its impact and effective implementation within modern solutions can take time. For now, we will just examine what this term means and the types of scenarios it offers before considering the more involved use cases.

Feature management is the name given to the practice of manipulating the experience that is offered within a system without needing to rewrite the code. It is not a new concept, but there are modern approaches to achieving this that empower teams to improve their processes and the products they are delivering.

Feature management is possible through the practice of encapsulating code within an if statement and then having a process to determine whether the conditional value is true or false. Based on that conditional value, a different part of the code is executed; this allows for two or more implementations to be in the code base, but only one is executed per request.

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