Toggle is a digital trade journal that showcases the crucial role technology plays in companies and organizations across all industries. From cybersecurity to AI and machine learning, we explore the many ways these tools are being used by CIOs and CTOs to meet their business goals.
The toggle enables teams to write and test new features in a controlled environment without deploying the code to production. As a result, Feature Toggles help to shorten the feedback loop between dev and QA and allow teams to deliver changes faster, resulting in greater agility.
Feature Toggles can be configured to change a program’s behavior based on a number of conditions, from fitness test results, to settings in a configuration management tool, or even a variable provided by the user in an API request. This allows a wide range of possibilities to trigger which way a toggle flips and helps teams make better decisions about what should be enabled when.
Some teams are so committed to the power of Feature Toggles that they use them as part of their continuous deployment process. For example, Facebook uses Feature Toggles to roll out new features to a small percentage of users at a time before making them available to all. This helps them gather performance data and user feedback before releasing the new feature to all users.
Using too many toggles is a risk, and it’s important for teams to monitor their inventory to ensure they don’t grow uncontrollably. Savvy teams understand that each toggle has a carrying cost and try to keep this cost low by being proactive about cleaning up toggles that have been unused for some time. This can be achieved through a variety of techniques including adding removal tasks to the team’s backlog and creating “expiration dates” on toggles that will fail a release (and even refuse to start the application!) if they remain undiscovered past their expiration date.
