62 posts tagged with "how to"

Sending your code out into the world can be a nerve-wracking experience. Regardless of how much testing you do beforehand, you’re never quite sure if everything will work according to plan. Even if it’s the case, during an applications life-time, you’ll need to redeploy your code many times. Code redeployment means time, money and a lot of hassle.

Fortunately, feature flags are useful tools that can help reduce the need for code redeployment as well as enable you to test your changes in production without affecting the end-user. In this article, I’ll show you how to make use of feature toggles in a React-like framework. So…

Software development is a really challenging endeavor. A lot of time and energy has to go into making sure that customers like what you're building for them.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that product development mainly consists of coding. Developing a product (ideally) needs specialists, managers, tactics, and various tools. A good idea can indeed go a long way, but if you want to give your product the highest possible chance to penetrate the market, then you need to allocate all possible resources that you have available to throw at it.

When it comes to releasing new features or changes in software, we can rely on A/B testing for making informed decisions. In this type of testing, we can measure the impact of the new change or feature on users before deciding to deploy it. By doing so, we can carefully roll out updates without negatively impacting user experience.

Feature flags are a great way to control the release of new features in your software. They allow you to easily turn new features on or off without redeploying your code.

However, when implementing a feature flag in an application, we may want to customize its management after the initial release, i.e., schedule an incremental release/delivery strategy that is carried out automatically or schedule future changes to a flag's targeting rule that can take effect at specific time intervals.

For example:

• Activate a flag’s config by date and time. For instance, release a feature at noon on a Sunday afternoon.
• Gradually increase the discount value of an ongoing promotion at specific times of weekdays.
• Enable a feature only on weekends or on weekdays.
• Three days from today, turn on a feature for internal testing and enable it for public use a week later.

The world population continues to grow, and so does the number of house pets. While we all hope most of them have a good quality of life, some don't have a home. To combat this, we can make an animal care app. In this blog post, the app's objective is to increase the pet adoption rate. We will change the color of our call-to-action button and measure the click-through rate of each button version using A/B testing.

The goal of software development workflows is geared toward releasing new features and updates, which can sometimes cause issues if not handled correctly. In my opinion, using feature flags has proven to be essential in situations like these. You can use them to easily deploy new features, and if there are bugs you can quickly turn a feature off, then turned it on again when they have been fixed without having to redeploy the app.

Autumn of 2021 saw the release of the newest .NET version, .NET6. This new release brought some updates that could potentially make a developer’s life easier, such as improved performance and a simpler development process. With less code to write and productivity tools like hot reloading, the new .NET was quickly adopted by developers all over the world.

Even before the new release, .NET had a wide range of utilities and has risen to become of the most popular frameworks available. Whether you’re migrating from an older version or just getting started on a new project, you may be wondering what feature management solutions are available to you. I wondered as well, so in this tutorial, I’ll go over one of the best - using feature flags.

If you’ve been reading about feature flags then I’m sure you’re convinced of the power and value they provide. Since development is mostly a team effort, you may be wondering how to manage a feature flag within a team, regardless of size, so one developer’s work doesn’t affect another’s. Well, in this article, we discuss exactly this issue and offer two solutions, depending on the size of your team.

Picture this: You’ve added a new feature to your software, linked it to a feature flag, and deployed it to production. Now, you’d like to enable this feature for a subset of your users to get their feedback before you take the leap and roll it out to everyone.

But who gets to see this new feature first? How do you choose the first user segment? How do you use feature flag rules to target them?

Good to know: Feature flags let you launch new features and change your software configuration without (re)deploying code.

Let’s look at some typical real-world examples of how you can do canary releases using ConfigCat.

When it comes to smooth deployment and roll-out of new features in software products, feature flags play a critical role. Across software development workflows like agile, they are becoming essential. I have found that using them drastically reduced the risk of adversely affecting user experience since they enable me to quickly disable a new feature if unintentional bugs are discovered.