May 2023 Summaries

The blog post discusses the importance of feature management in launching major features without compromising customer experience. It highlights how Hulu, a streaming service, outgrew its homebuilt feature flag system and moved to a more scalable and safe release process using LaunchDarkly Custom Attributes at their Galaxy conference. The talk by Senior Software Engineer Matthieu Labbe and Client Architect Dominic Hopton delves into the challenges faced with Hulu's previous feature flag solution, which was stashed in its device config service. They explain how they set up LaunchDarkly users to represent devices rather than people, using custom attributes to identify customers without personal identifiable information (PII). The post concludes by emphasizing that LaunchDarkly users don't have to be people and can be whatever you want them to be, as demonstrated in Hulu's successful launch of their new UI with just a few clicks.

PowerSchool, a leading K-12 education technology solutions provider, successfully migrated its legacy system to AWS using LaunchDarkly for feature updates and Amazon DynamoDB for database management. The migration was done while maintaining a consistent experience for millions of students served by the company. By leveraging feature flags and incremental migration, PowerSchool reduced its codebase from 100,000 lines to smaller, more manageable domain services, improving productivity and work satisfaction among developers. This modernization journey allowed them to innovate confidently with minimized disruption for customers.

The text discusses how Naviance, an EdTech company, faced challenges due to its monolithic architecture as it grew. Principal Architect Adam Hisley shared their experience using LaunchDarkly's platform to modernize their software architecture and team practices. He emphasized the importance of understanding customer needs and aligning technical and market vision for making good architectural decisions. Naviance rewrote a monolith from scratch in a new programming language while progressively enhancing its application by breaking apart the monolith module-by-module. Feature flags played a crucial role in ensuring quality, building confidence, and enabling controlled data migrations during this process. Since 2019, Naviance has built nine separate domain services following this model, improving customer experiences with new features and boosting productivity. The team expressed high sentiment for LaunchDarkly in their annual engineering survey, ranking it near the top in terms of developer happiness and preference.

LaunchDarkly is hosting a Software Release Summit on May 18th at 9 am PST to discuss the state of software releases and tips for expanding their use cases. The summit will also cover how customers are building better software with LaunchDarkly. This event marks the beginning of a series of live events focused on various ways to utilize LaunchDarkly to improve software quality. Upcoming summits this year will focus on Technology Migrations, Targeted Experiences, A/B Tests and Experimentation, and Mobile App Control. The summit will feature discussions with industry experts and customers sharing their experiences using LaunchDarkly for managing releases.

The text discusses the challenges faced by public sector agencies in modernizing their systems and migrating to microservices due to inconsistent release controls, risky code releases, lack of confidence in releases, and complicated legacy testing environments. It introduces feature management as a solution to these problems, which involves using conditional statements (feature flags) to control features in a precise and rule-based manner. Feature management can help improve continuous delivery practices, reduce or eliminate costly pre-production testing, enable experimentation without risk, streamline security, and automate the feature flag lifecycle. Overall, enterprise feature management is presented as a powerful tool that can help government agencies overcome silent blockers hindering their IT transformation efforts and achieve their modernization goals more efficiently and effectively.

General Motors (GM), a leading automaker, is leveraging feature flags to manage the increasing complexities in vehicles due to software integration and the transition to electric energy sources. Jim DeMercurio, Director of Mobile Solutions at GM, spoke about how LaunchDarkly has been instrumental in this process. The company's mobile applications, including Mybrand (MyGMC, MyChevrolet, MyCadillac, MyBuick) and Onstar Guardian, require extensive testing across various phone models, operating system versions, vehicle makes, models, years, subscription accounts, and types of subscriptions. DeMercurio highlighted that adding more test cycles is not the solution; instead, GM has adopted a method with LaunchDarkly that has proven successful. By reducing cycle time and separating deployment from release, General Motors now delivers value to customers faster and with higher quality. The company plans to integrate LaunchDarkly into back office systems, expand A/B testing, and automate the feature switch ramp-up and ramp-down process based on performance metrics in the future.