December 2016 Summaries

Beta testing is crucial for product development, but traditional methods have become challenging due to continuous delivery and increased release cadence. Feature toggles are an effective solution to overcome these challenges by allowing granular control over software releases. They enable non-technical team members to opt-in users to new beta experiences, perform incremental percentage rollouts, and provide real-time opt-in/opt-out options. Feature toggle management platforms can further enhance the process by providing access control and mitigating technical debt.

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Edith and Paul discuss goal-setting methods such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). They emphasize the importance of setting goals for teams and individuals to ensure productivity and focus on the most important tasks. The pair also touch upon the challenges of measuring success and avoiding "gameability" in goal-setting processes. Furthermore, they discuss how continuous delivery can benefit from effective goal-setting strategies.

LaunchDarkly, a feature flag management platform, has successfully raised an 8.7 million Series A funding led by Josh Stein of DFJ. The company's co-founder and CTO, John, expresses excitement about the next chapter for LaunchDarkly. Since its seed round in June 2015, the company has grown from a team of four to serving billions of feature flags daily to clients like AppDirect, CircleCI, Lanetix, and Upserve. The funding will be used to hire more engineers and expand the sales, support, and customer success teams. LaunchDarkly aims to separate business logic from code, allowing software teams to build better products faster while benefiting operations, product, marketing, and sales departments.

The author has started their first week at LaunchDarkly as a DevOps engineer, becoming employee number 10. They are impressed by the office's location on the third floor of the Heavybit building with its numerous windows and views. The office interior is also commendable with an abundance of snacks, drinks, and good lunches. During this week, they have been getting familiar with LaunchDarkly's product development, deployment, and maintenance processes while learning new tools from other startups. Overall, the author finds their experience at LaunchDarkly to be excellent, surrounded by great people working on a remarkable product for an outstanding company. They are confident in their decision to join and eager for future opportunities.

In their first week at LaunchDarkly, the author highlights the company's strong focus on its people, market positioning, and product architecture. They mention that everyone in the company is friendly and collaborative, with an honest and direct approach to communication. The author also notes that LaunchDarkly is well-positioned to capitalize on the changing landscape of software development and delivery, as it enables faster, higher quality releases. Furthermore, they praise the product's Enterprise-class architecture for its scalability and security. Overall, the author expresses excitement about their new role at LaunchDarkly and anticipates further learning and growth in the company.

Feature flags, initially used for mitigating risks in software releases, have evolved into powerful tools for managing dynamic content, plans, personalization, styling, and cross-platform consistency. By using multivariate feature flags, developers can serve strings, numbers, JSON objects, and arrays to control various aspects of their applications. Plan management allows for easy bundling and editing of features in different plans, while pricing use cases such as localization, seasonality, and discount codes can be managed separately from the application logic. Personalization and styling can also be achieved using feature flags, serving as a quasi-content management system. Cross-platform feature flagging ensures consistent user experiences across web and mobile platforms, allowing for simultaneous or separate releases, real-time personalization, percentage rollouts, and kill switches. To manage the complexities of feature flags at an enterprise scale, UI flag management can be implemented to empower non-technical teammates with control over targeting users, performing rollouts, and running beta tests. This also helps in maintaining flag implementation consistency, scalability, and management across multiple development environments.

Dolphin delivered a talk at Defrag X on "The cultural changes of feature flags vs feature branching." The discussion highlighted how feature flags allow organizations to shift from waterfall thinking to an iterative, customer-centric approach. Many attendees appreciated the presentation. The speaker also mentioned meeting with an Engineering Director who transitioned from a six-month release cycle to a faster one and is now ready to implement feature flag management. Defrag X marked its tenth year of successful conferences, including a rare snow appearance.