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 7: Trunk-Based Development

So far, we have explored how feature management can empower teams to separate deploying code from releasing a feature and the opportunities this presents to rolling out features, running experiments, and disabling or enabling functionality at critical moments. These are all practical ways in which feature management can impact the product, but this chapter, on trunk-based development, is the first time we will explore how feature management offers new practices and processes for how software development teams can approach building software.

This chapter focuses on how the practice of software development can be fundamentally changed and improved when effective management is implemented within an application. This is done through a practice called trunk-based development.

Without going into too much detail now (details will be provided in the Understanding trunk-based development section), the idea of trunk-based development relates to the processes...