September 2023 Summaries

LaunchDarkly's Talkin' Ship developer workshops aim to help developers enhance their software delivery process by using feature flags. The monthly, hands-on workshops demonstrate how LaunchDarkly can control every aspect of feature releases and enable both speedy deliveries and safer/less risky releases. Attendees learn about core use cases such as de-risking releases, technology modernization, targeted experiences, and product experiences. The workshops also provide a step-by-step process for using the platform to release features and measure their effectiveness. LaunchDarkly's user conference, Galaxy 2023, will feature additional talks and best practices sessions focused on new features and customer success stories.

The text discusses the importance of continuous improvement and experimentation in today's dynamic business landscape. It highlights that large-scale experimentation is practiced by industry leaders to make informed decisions and achieve incremental gains, reducing risks to their bottom line. Experimentation helps companies fine-tune products and services consistently, preventing unintentional harm or release of unproven features. The numbers game emphasizes the benefits of running more experiments for improved business outcomes, higher success rates, and valuable learnings. Embracing experimentation is crucial in today's competitive environment, as it guides businesses to make informed decisions that drive success.

LaunchDarkly has expanded its server-side streaming service to Europe and Asia Pacific regions, in addition to the existing North America region. This update aims to improve connection speeds and reduce app start-up times for customers using server-side streaming SDKs globally. The Flag Delivery team completed the rollout with a focus on enhancing LaunchDarkly's service resilience across all regions. The new data centers have significantly reduced stream initialization latency, particularly in Asia Pacific, where it saw more than a 75% reduction. Additionally, the update has improved service resiliency, allowing for regional failovers and maintenance without affecting overall performance.

The 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle report highlights the growing importance and adoption of feature management in Agile and DevOps. Feature management is a set of practices that allows development teams to release, control, and optimize software features in real-time, separating a developer's code from deployment. The practice has moved closer to the Plateau of Productivity stage, indicating its increasing acceptance as a standard method for delivering high business benefits with less risk. Feature management offers enhanced capabilities such as high-resolution personalization, real-time A/B testing, and increased velocity of product development, allowing companies to become highly responsive to shifting market characteristics. The report encourages business leaders to explore the adoption drivers, obstacles, and user recommendations for feature management and other emerging technologies in Agile and DevOps.