A toggle is a piece of technology that allows you to switch back and forth between two states or options. It’s often used in everyday technology such as computers and phones. Toggle is also used in software development to describe a feature that can be turned on and off without having to change the codebase.
Feature toggles support dev teams as they write new features by leaving them inactive in production until they are ready for release, market testing or whatever else is needed next. This is an alternative to writing features on code branches and integrating them into trunk code which would require a lengthy QA and testing process.
When designing a toggle it’s important to make sure that the toggle’s label is action oriented and that it has a binary answer that is either ON or OFF. This ensures that users are aware of what state the toggle is in and how to make it active again. It’s also a good idea to have a visual representation of the toggle on a screen so that there is no confusion about what state it is in.
When managing the configuration of a toggle it can be tempting to hardcode it in the codebase using things like if statements or preprocessor’s #ifdef. However this becomes cumbersome at scale and many organizations choose to move the toggle configuration into some form of centralized store such as an existing application DB or even a feature management platform such as Kameleoon. This is done in order to enable system operators, testers and product managers to manage the feature flags easily and dynamically.
