Feature Flags

I am very pleased to share that my development teams are making good use of the Azure App Configuration Feature Manager. The teams were already familiar with simple on/off flags. We had previously been using LaunchDarkly, but we retired it to reduce our IT costs. LaunchDarkly has an excellent interface and useful features. Many of the developers mourned the loss of LaunchDarkly. The show must go on, however, so the developers adapted.

As more teams in my part of the organization have embraced using feature flags, we’re clearly generating some significant technical debt based on the number of pages of flags in the Azure portal. One of the developers generated a report for me and we have an alarming number of enabled flags that are older than 90 days. I need to get a handle on this!

Here are some quick first steps I know I need to take.

Step 1: Retire Old Flags

I need to generate some tech debt tickets for the team to start extracting old flags that haven’t changed state in some length of time. I will start with flags that are 90 days older and work my way forward.

Step 2: Get Consensus on Naming Conventions

As more teams are taking advantage of the feature flags, it is clear that the teams are calling the flags whatever makes sense in the moment for them. I need to establish some best practices for names and descriptions before things get out of hand and somebody deletes a flag another team was using.

Step 3: Create a Process to Review Feature Flags

While the development teams will do most of the work of creating and deleting feature flags, we have had laid offs and reorganization events in the past. If we can establish some kind of feature flag governance process, we can successfully manage the flags even when teams get reshuffled or dissolved.

This could be a good use case for using some kind of AI agent. The agent could review the feature flags at some interval, generate a report for leadership, spawn tech debt tickets for associated teams, etc.

I’ll keep pushing forward on this and create a future post regarding my progress. Stay tuned!