January 2017 Summaries

LaunchDarkly offers a feature flag management system that allows users to create tags for organizing and grouping their feature flags. Tags such as "Front-End", "Ops", "Marketing", and "Restricted" can be added to categorize flags and manage custom permissions. After adding tags, users can filter by tag on the dashboard and link to filters for better feature flag management. Creating a filter also generates a URL that can be bookmarked and shared with team members. LaunchDarkly plans to add more advanced filtering and sorting options in the future.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a platform that enables development teams to build, integrate, test, and release new software in a single environment. It includes centralized version control, package management, and release management components for agile teams. However, traditional methods of controlling feature visibility are engineer-dependent and limit granular user segment targeting and incremental percentage rollouts. LaunchDarkly is an extension that allows users to control the full release lifecycle of features using feature flags, which can be controlled by non-developers through a UI. The integration of VSTS and LaunchDarkly enables teams to centralize feature and release lifecycle management, perform percentage rollouts, and gain better visibility into features and outcomes for continuous delivery and superior project management.

The author started their new job at LaunchDarkly and immediately felt welcomed by the team. They met the entire company within minutes and found everyone to be experienced and engaged, with a good sense of humor. The office space is cozy and stylish, fostering a sense of community among startups. During their first week, they fixed bugs, reviewed code, deployed to production, and assisted with support tickets. They are excited about the company's agile approach and look forward to contributing to its growth as employee #12.

The author describes their experience at LaunchDarkly's office space located inside Heavybit, which has an industrial theme with natural light and interesting amenities such as meetup spaces, workshops, kitchen facilities, and daily lunch. They joined the company on its first day of the new year and found the leadership to be supportive and approachable, fostering a low-key, autonomous work environment. The author is excited about contributing to the team's growth and learning from the LaunchDarkly community.

Usability testing in a real-world environment provides valuable insights into how users interact with products in their daily lives, but it is challenging to truly simulate this context in a lab setting. While non-production usability tests are necessary for identifying bugs and gathering feedback quickly, they can introduce biases that may not reflect actual user behavior. To mitigate these issues, comprehensive usability testing should involve internal, staging, and production environments. Usability testing in production allows for genuine user feedback, quantitative insights into feature performance, contextual understanding of feature efficacy, and qualitative feedback. By using feature flags, companies can control the release of new features to a percentage of users, allowing them to gather real-world user feedback while managing risk.