If you’re new to feature flags, you may not yet understand how profound their impact can be for software release. We’ve gone over it a bit in past blogs (namely in pieces like 5 Feature Flag Use Cases You May Not Have Thought Of and The Benefits Of Feature Flags In Software Delivery), but this article will focus on challenges they can solve, and what value they bring - for both technical and business sides.
This article contains an excerpt from our eBook, The Basics: Feature Flags 101. If you like the content you see, stick around to the end where we’ll link the full eBook for you.
At a high level, feature flags give more power and control to developers to create more - and better - features, faster. At the same time, they ensure that engineering is not the bottleneck for the business in having to make changes for individual customers, or for ensuring a perfect deployment to their production environment for every new feature or update.
What are some of the key challenges that feature flags solve? In general, the challenges revolve around release governance, control over user experience, and deployment issues:
These are the benefits that feature flags bring to engineering teams:
Ultimately, the use of feature flags results in the following outcomes for technical teams (and happier developers):
Because feature flags decouple deployment from the software release life cycle, the business is given control over when users or customers will see a feature. No more engineering bottlenecks, no more annoyed customers, and no more scrambling from engineering, marketing, and sales to meet a deployment deadline. For the business, it means shipping features faster, incurring less risk, and keeping both internal developers and external customers happier.
What are some of the key challenges that feature flags solve? In general, the challenges revolve around the feature release process, risk management, and cost/revenue impact:
These are the benefits that feature flags bring to the business:
Ultimately, the use of feature flags results in the following outcomes for the business:
When you look at this article and the one linked above about use cases, it paints a clear picture about the value you can unlock with feature flags. We find that in many cases, people who didn’t think they needed flags really did. And incidentally, flags solved more than one problem for them.
Whether you find yourself trying to solve a pressing problem in your software delivery process, to get more control over your customer-facing application experience, or to get ahead of the game and see how you can better leverage technology, feature flags can greatly impact how you approach software delivery and the effect it will have on your users.
Are you ready to learn more about the impact of feature flags? If so, download the full eBook here: The Basics: Feature Flags 101.
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