January 2016 Summaries

LaunchDarkly has introduced a new permission system with Custom Roles, providing comprehensive and fine-grained access control to enterprise customers. The feature is inspired by Amazon's IAM and allows users to create custom policies for controlling everything in LaunchDarkly. This includes feature flags, goals, environments, and teams. Custom roles can be assigned to team members alongside basic global roles (Reader, Writer, Admin, Owner). Currently, the Custom Roles feature is in beta and available only to enterprise customers.

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss continuous delivery with Peter van Hardenberg. They talk about the importance of communication within a team, how to maintain consistency in messaging, and the pitfalls of continuous delivery. The conversation also touches on the role of code review in ensuring quality software development.

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss the evolution of programming languages and how they reflect the changing needs of software development. They also touch on the role of continuous delivery in the success of companies like Zynga and LinkedIn's aggressive approach to user engagement. Additionally, they explore the concept of co-metrics as a way to balance product improvements with potential negative consequences for users.

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Sam Stagg discusses the concept of testing in software development. He explains that testing is not about finding bugs but rather increasing confidence in a system's behavior. This approach aligns with continuous delivery practices where teams aim to release changes frequently and reliably. The conversation also touches on product management dynamics and how they can impact testing strategies within an organization.

Yonni Mendes, Front-End Team Leader at Behalf.com, shared a post about how feature flags have improved their development and release cycle. Behalf has received significant funding to support small companies in obtaining loans for growth. They utilize LaunchDarkly to maintain stability in their continuous delivery processes. In the post, Yonni discusses deploying an untested new feature without proper automation or workflow testing, highlighting the importance of feature flags in managing such situations.

Product Managers play a crucial role in the development of products, acting as engineers, designers, business minds, and marketers. They are responsible for understanding customer needs and wants, empathizing with their target audience, and using tools like Jira, Aha, and Mavenlink to manage teams and track progress. Two key aspects of effective product management that often lack dedicated tools are Customer Empathy and Customer Feedback. To overcome this, some companies have integrated feature flags into their development cycle, allowing them to test new features in a real-world environment with real users before launching it to everyone. This approach helps PMs be more responsive to feedback without having to leave a 'bad feature' out on the market for too long.