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 5: Experimentation

Our focus with feature management so far has been on how to ensure that features can be released to production in a safer and more controlled manner than more traditional approaches. This can be achieved by decoupling the deployment of code from the release of a new feature by making use of rollouts, as we saw in Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts.

But once it is possible to use feature management within a production application, new opportunities become available for working with new implementations and understanding how users interact with them. In this chapter, we will explore one of the main new opportunities that feature management presents: experimentation.

When it comes to how we can use LaunchDarkly to help us experiment, we will be building on our previous discoveries from Chapter 4, Percentage and Ring Rollouts, as a rollout is often the best approach to experimenting with new ideas in production. Within that chapter, I spoke about the...