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

Throughout this chapter, we looked at what feature management is and what it offers to teams and businesses. We also examined what feature flags are, both temporary and permanent, and the scenarios that both types make available. These sections help us to understand how, in using feature flags, it is possible to use the production environment to do more reliable testing and rely on customers to actually inform the work that is carried out.

Feature management offers new and unique ways to design, build, deploy, release, and test software that extends many of the current ways of delivering software. For modern software companies in today's fast-paced and competitive markets, anything that can be done to ensure that the features being built are of most value to customers is vital. Opportunities such as testing in production and hypothesis-driven engineering are approaches that companies can use to become more effective.

From a technological standpoint, I hope to make...