Rootconf 2016

Feature Toggle is one of the key practices for Continuous Delivery, but not enough has spoken about the same. This session is to give an intro about Feature Toggle and explain the advantages it has over Feature branching and share my experience while using it for the last few years.

Feature toggles are supposed to be short lived, and if not, can contribute to Technical Debt. The session will touch upon the same too.

Outline

Feature branching has been popular for long, but everyone knows about the “merge hell”, a common issue because of long-lived branches or infrequent integration. How do you continuously merge, test and release software with great confidence without spending too much time on merging and fixing conflict issues? That is where Mainline development, one of the key practices of Continuous Delivery, comes into the picture and Feature Toggle works in conjunction with the same.

Feature Toggle [also referred as Feature Flip, Feature Switch, Feature flag] is a simple technique which allows you to turn on or off a feature through configuration. Feature toggles give you the flexibility to toggle features in specific environments i.e. turn on a feature in testing or staging servers and turn it off the same in production. This also helps to rollback features, as rolling back is as simple as turning off the feature and deploying.

Speaker bio

Leena is the Head of Engineering @ Multunus. She was bitten by the TDD bug few years ago. Having done enough TDD in Ruby/Rails, Javascript and Android, she’s moved onto Continuous Delivery (CD) in a big way - even spoke about CD in multiple conferences and has conducted workshops on the same.

Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/leenasn/merge-hells-feature-toggles-to-the-rescue-60956458