June 2021 Summaries

LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery team has released several new features, including Approval Workflows for requiring approvals before making changes to critical environments, integration with ServiceNow for requesting approvals for flag changes, and improvements in SDK initialization times. Other updates include support for Erlang and Apex Salesforce SDKs, alias events for correlating anonymous users during experiments, the ability to convert any targeting rule into a segment, enhancements to the Users page, and visibility of feature flag dependencies within the Targeting and Variations tabs. Upcoming features include support for large user segments, new integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk, team administration improvements, and workflow templates.

KnowBe4, the world's largest security awareness training company with over 39,000 global customers, sought to improve efficiency and productivity by finding a feature management solution that could be used across all of its engineering teams. The team decided against building their own solution in-house due to resource constraints and chose LaunchDarkly for its intuitive user interface, sophisticated targeting capabilities, SDKs for major languages, and trusted architecture. Since implementing LaunchDarkly, KnowBe4 has reported a 23% increase in production output and reduced infrastructure costs by eliminating six development and staging environments. The company plans to continue expanding the use of LaunchDarkly across its teams and leverage it for new use cases.

The text discusses a case study on how Pearson, a large organization, successfully implemented LaunchDarkly as part of their software suite. It highlights the challenges faced by such organizations in terms of technical and security vetting, rollout, adoption, and stakeholder management. Aaron Kaka, solution architect for Pearson, shares his experience with the decision-making process that led to selecting LaunchDarkly and some key points of consideration during the implementation phase. He emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive demo, stakeholder buy-in, and establishing best practices for future projects. The text also mentions the support received from LaunchDarkly's customer success manager and their willingness to provide live training and record sessions for knowledge sharing.

In this webinar, Heidi Waterhouse discusses the importance of psychological safety in teams and how it can lead to better software deployments. She emphasizes that a blameless culture is crucial for encouraging curiosity and innovation. Additionally, she highlights the need for risk reduction and harm mitigation strategies in deployment processes. Waterhouse also shares insights on testing in production, continuous deployment, hypothesis-driven development, and how these concepts can help organizations reduce risks and improve their software deployments. She encourages teams to adopt a mindset of experimentation and learning from failures.

In this talk, Dan O'Brien, a senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly, discusses the importance of maintaining focus and minimizing distractions for developer productivity. He highlights how LaunchDarkly's platform and integrations can help developers stay on task by providing context information when needed. The talk also covers various tools that developers use daily, such as code editors, task management, and chat apps, and demonstrates how LaunchDarkly fits into these workflows to enhance productivity. By staying focused and using the right tools, developers can improve their overall efficiency and achieve better results in their projects.

The market for software developers has become highly competitive due to the shift towards remote work during the pandemic. Companies are looking for ways to recruit and retain talent in this new landscape. Leaders are rethinking recruiting and interviewing processes, focusing on creating positive candidate experiences and ensuring equitable and scalable hiring practices. Culture is also seen as a differentiator for attracting and retaining engineers, with companies emphasizing diversity, inclusivity, and continuous learning. Standardization of tools and processes can help maintain efficiency as teams grow, while allowing flexibility in technology choices.

The text discusses how feature flags played a crucial role in enabling StockX, an e-commerce platform for exclusive consumer goods, to safely conduct A/B testing on its homepage during Black Friday 2020. Despite initial setbacks due to back-end issues, the new GraphQL-powered home page was able to handle traffic surges and outperform the old one in terms of user experience and sales conversion. The use of feature flags allowed StockX to safely launch and test its new features without risking a negative impact on customer experience or platform stability. This approach is recommended for other companies looking to innovate while ensuring safety and reliability.

Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is a five-step Agile framework that focuses on making progress on features in one to two-week sprints. The methodology assigns roles and utilizes project management best practices for consistency, making it easier for new team members to onboard. FDD involves six primary roles: Project Manager, Chief Architect, Development Manager, Chief Programmer, Class Owners, and Domain Expert. The first two phases of an FDD project focus on the overall project, while the final three steps are repeated for each feature defined in the model. Advantages to FDD include fewer meetings, better communication through documentation, and a short-iteration process that breaks large projects into smaller chunks. Feature flags complement FDD by allowing features to be separated from deploys, enabling developers to release features incrementally while still working on them.