December 2015 Summaries

Silicon Valley's innovative work culture often promotes employee happiness and harmonious environments, but it doesn't always guarantee a successful product. To channel this culture into a successful product, three core tenants are crucial: intellectual curiosity, reciprocated support, and vision-driven development. Intellectual curiosity encourages continuous learning and fosters diverse contributions to the product. Reciprocated support creates an environment where team members work for each other, leading to mutual motivation and dedication. Vision-driven development ensures that the team believes in the product's purpose beyond financial success, which helps maintain passion and pride in their work. When these values are embraced by a cohesive team, they can create a successful product that benefits both customers and employees.

Tout, a video platform for media brands and content publishers, uses feature toggles in their development process to manage product configuration differently for each partner website. They initially used an open-source Ruby library called 'feature' but later realized several unintended benefits such as easier rollbacks, minimized environment contention, and zero-downtime feature cutover. Despite some initial concerns about code complexity, Tout found that using feature toggles greatly simplified their development process and improved overall efficiency.

Feature flags, a key component of successful continuous delivery, allow software teams to release features faster and more efficiently. While some companies maintain their own feature flagging frameworks, many are turning to LaunchDarkly for its ROI, reuse, maintenance, and sophistication benefits. LaunchDarkly is easy to integrate into existing development cycles and offers both simple and complex feature flagging options. Major companies like Auction.com, CircleCI, and Heroku have adopted LaunchDarkly's feature flags as a service for faster development with less risk.

In this episode of “To Be Continuous,” Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar talk with Kevin Henrikson about how Mailbox was able to launch so quickly, despite being a small team. They discuss the importance of continuous delivery in their development process, as well as the challenges they faced when transitioning from an independent startup to becoming part of Microsoft. Kevin explains that Mailbox used feature flags to allow them to release code without having it be a blocker on the launch. This allowed them to iterate quickly and make changes based on user feedback. They also talk about how they were able to maintain their fast development pace even after being acquired by Microsoft, despite facing some resistance from within the company. Overall, this episode provides valuable insights into the strategies and techniques that can be used to accelerate software development and improve product quality.

Consumer expectations for app performance have significantly increased, with users demanding instant, smooth, and intelligent operation. Developers must adapt their development processes to meet these heightened standards. Incremental rollouts can help manage risk and exceed consumer expectations by allowing developers to assess an application's response to a new feature before fully launching it. Feature flag-driven development enables compartmentalized releases, whereby features are wrapped in conditions and incrementally turned on for specific users while monitoring performance feedback. This approach helps mitigate unanticipated performance degradation and ensures seamless application performance, meeting consumer expectations.