A toggle is a switch that has two positions, one for turning something on and another to turn it off. It’s common to see toggles in everyday technology, such as the switches on a car’s radio that enable WiFi and Bluetooth(r). Toggles are also used in software applications to control settings or features.
Toggles are great for making it easy to make changes without impacting the rest of the application — they let you swap between development and production codebases, test environments, or different features in your system. This makes them a powerful tool for supporting Dev teams as they work on new feature development. Using feature toggles can reduce the need to merge new features into trunk and help you hit your delivery targets.
However, when used incorrectly, toggles can create a significant amount of complexity and confusion in a shared environment. In order to prevent this, we recommend that you consider a more scalable solution for managing toggle configuration. This usually involves moving toggle configuration away from static files and into a centralised store, such as an existing application DB. It should also include an admin UI that allows system operators, testers and product managers to view, modify and toggle feature flags at runtime.
The main issue with toggles is that they tend to rely on color as their primary way of conveying state. This is problematic because it isn’t consistent with WCAG guidance that we shouldn’t rely on colors alone to convey meaning. In addition, some users have colour vision deficiencies that can cause them to struggle to understand what the toggle states mean.
