Many sites control the activation of new features using feature flags. Typically, this is a switch controlled in each environment. A feature flipper is a switch in your code that determines whether a feature should be made available to certain customers. But we shall use the general term feature flags here.
Several Django packages provide feature flags, such as gargoyle and django-waffle. These packages store feature flags of a site in the database. They can be activated or deactivated through the admin interface or through management commands. Hence, every environment (production, testing, development, and so on) can have its own set of activated features.
Feature flags were originally documented in Flickr (see http://code.flickr.net/2009/12/02/flipping-out/ ...