From the community: How to manage your feature flags (and your technical debt)
Blog post from Unleash
Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, offer the advantage of faster releases and controlled experimentation, but require a structured management approach to maintain their effectiveness and avoid technical debt. Key best practices include establishing clear naming conventions to enhance communication and understanding among developers and stakeholders, maintaining the scope of each flag to specific functions, and ensuring that existing features remain accessible when new ones are toggled off. Automation and streamlined release processes, potentially using tools like Unleash, can simplify flag management by integrating with CI/CD workflows, enabling programmatic control and synchronization of flag states. Implementing access controls can enhance stability and security, while tracking changes and maintaining logs of flag mutations can provide valuable insights into the impact of each flag over time. Finally, it's crucial to remove obsolete flags after confirming that a new feature will not be rolled back, to reduce complexity and prevent unnecessary maintenance overhead, thereby ensuring a clean and efficient feature flag lifecycle.