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How to Design Feature Toggle Toggles Slot Machines

A toggle is a small piece of wood or plastic that can be pushed through a loop or hole to fasten it. A toggle can also refer to a software switch that allows a user to turn on and off features or options. Toggles are an essential tool for continuous development that can help reduce risk by validating new or redesigned functionality with a segment of your audience before it goes live.

One of the most important considerations when deploying feature toggles is how to manage their configuration, especially in production. Savvy teams view their toggle inventory as something that comes with a carrying cost and seek to minimize the number of idle toggles in their codebase. This can be done with a simple commenting approach, using a preprocessor or compiler’s #ifdef feature, or by more sophisticated methods such as a feature flag registry.

While this may seem like a no-brainer, it is actually quite common to see developers create new toggles without explicitly managing them in some way. This can lead to a growing amount of clutter in your codebase, resulting in harder and longer to debug bugs as well as increasing the likelihood that users will encounter unintended behavior or errors due to a legacy toggle.

A good practice when creating and deploying toggles is to always give them a unique name that includes some useful information such as who created it, how long it has been in use, or what it does. This will make it easier for your team to maintain consistency across your entire codebase and provide context for anyone reviewing errors or warnings generated by a production release.