December 2022 Summaries

LaunchDarkly had a productive year in 2022, focusing on improving software releases for organizations of all sizes. They introduced several product updates such as LaunchDarkly Experimentation, Teams, Flag defaults, Workflow Builder, Feature Workflows, and Workflow Templates. Additionally, they hosted the travelling Galaxy conference across five cities in the United States to connect with customers face-to-face. The company also held a webinar on high-performing teams and released a report on "Release assurance: Why innovative software delivery starts with trust and psychological safety." They participated in AWS's re:Invent conference, where they were awarded for their captivating presence.

LaunchDarkly, a software organization, has integrated its feature flag services with Slack to streamline change management processes. With this integration, teams can now manage approvals for flag changes directly from Slack, reducing the need for manual tracking and collaboration via email. The native approval system and audit log provided by LaunchDarkly also help businesses automate controls for governance and security initiatives. This integration is available to all Pro and Enterprise customers of LaunchDarkly.

LaunchDarkly's Trajectory Conference featured several insightful talks, with the top five being Product updates galore: contexts, accelerate and more by Jon Schulman; Fireside chatting with Vodafone featuring Jessica Cregg and Robert Greville; On the road with GM presented by Jim Demercurio; OneMedical needs feature flags... STAT! delivered by Ben Yee; and Let the great experiments begin by Aaron Montana and Gideon Goldman. The conference covered topics such as LaunchDarkly's upcoming platform updates, Vodafone's experience with managing performant networks at scale, General Motors' use of feature management systems, OneMedical's implementation of a feature management solution, and experimentation design best practices.

LaunchDarkly hosted the Galaxy Conference series in five cities from June to October, featuring speaker sessions, demos, and keynotes aimed at improving customers' usage of their platform and feature management. The conference covered various topics such as feature flag use cases, edge computing, and core capabilities of any feature management tool. Speakers included Lucy Voigt, Software Engineer at LaunchDarkly, Cody De Arkland, Director of Developer Relations, Brian Rinaldi, Developer Relations Engineer, and John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder. The event also featured roundtable discussions with customers like Justin Duhatschek, Progressive Delivery Manager for KBX Technologies.

DevOps is a set of practices that aims to improve collaboration between software development (dev) and operations (ops). It emerged as a response to the inefficiencies and frustrations stemming from the divide between dev and ops teams. DevOps builds on Agile methodology by taking a cross-functional approach to building and releasing applications in shorter cycles, emphasizing automation and continuous feedback loops. The benefits of DevOps include faster software delivery, better performance and reliability, improved security posture, and increased scalability. However, implementing DevOps can be challenging due to factors such as resistance from team members, lack of clear goals or responsibilities, and unrealistic expectations about what it can achieve. To set your organization up for DevOps success, start small with a pilot program, focus on empowering teams with information rather than burdening them with additional responsibilities, invest in platform engineering to enable self-service, document technical and cultural best practices, encourage questions and create spaces for learning, and set inflection points to check in and reflect.

A kill switch in software development refers to a button that can turn off a specific feature when needed, allowing anyone with access to disable it quickly. This concept is often used in conjunction with feature flags, which are toggles that control the release of new features or changes in an application. Using feature flags as kill switches enables developers to separate deployments from releases and maintain continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes. Some advantages of using kill switches include efficient testing in production, managing network system loads during high traffic periods, automatic reverting of mobile app releases when issues arise, A/B testing and canary releases, and ensuring compliance with data privacy laws. LaunchDarkly is a platform that enables software teams to create and manage feature flags for effective Progressive Delivery with DevOps.

LaunchDarkly and Datadog have integrated to provide feature release context across tech stacks, enabling teams to monitor system health and instantly toggle features on or off. The integration includes three components: Events integration, Dashboard widget integration, and Flag triggers integration. These integrations allow users to automate feature toggling based on specific criteria, such as error rates reaching a predefined threshold. This helps modern DevOps teams maintain control over their observability platforms and quickly remediate issues before they impact end-users.

Release management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and managing the software release process from development and testing through to production. With the adoption of Agile methodologies, businesses have moved to more frequent releases of smaller, iterative improvements to their products and features. The role of the release manager emerged to ensure successful deliveries without causing issues in production. Release managers are responsible for planning the release calendar, coordinating across functions at each stage of the release cycle, ensuring all approvals are in place, and delivering successful releases. As DevOps has become prevalent, some aspects of the release management process have changed, along with a shift in release managers' responsibilities. Continuous delivery practices enable more frequent software releases, reducing human error and risks associated with continuous delivery through progressive delivery and feature flags. Release managers can now focus on monitoring metrics, reporting on them, and guiding future iterations based on customer feedback, potentially evolving into value stream managers.