Effective Feature Management

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. 1. Feature Management
   1. What Is a Feature Flag?
   2. Ship When You’re Ready
   3. Deploy != Release
   4. Test in Production
      1. True Test Environments Are Difficult to Create
      2. Test in Production
      3. Percentage Deployments
      4. Ring Deployments
   5. Stay in Control
      1. Flag Early and Often
      2. Safety Valves and Circuit Breakers
      3. Infrastructure Migrations
   6. Experiment with Everything
      1. Monitoring/Baselines
      2. A/B Testing
      3. User Feedback
   7. Customize on the Fly
      1. Entitlements and Plan Management
      2. Dynamic Configuration Management
   8. Summary
3. 2. Advice from the Front Lines
   1. First Steps with Feature Flags
      1. Your First Feature Flag
      2. Feature Flags in Your Workflow
      3. Flags and Branching Strategies
   2. Testing with Feature Flags
      1. Should I Test All Combinations of Flags?
      2. Flags and Libraries
      3. Unit Testing
      4. Integration Testing
   3. Managing Technical Debt
      1. Appoint a Maintainer
      2. Set Expiration Dates
      3. Flag Removal Branches and Pull Requests
      4. Finding Flag References
   4. Scaling to Large Teams
      1. Permissions and Role-Based Access Controls
      2. Collaboration
      3. Organizing Flags
   5. Feature Flags Versus Blue/Green Deploys
   6. Feature Flags Versus Configuration Management
   7. Summary
4. 3. Selecting a Feature Management Platform
   1. Feature Management
   2. Feature Management Is Mission Critical
      1. Design for Scale
      2. Polling Versus Streaming
      3. Design for Failure
   3. Design for Collaboration
      1. Adoptable
   4. Summary