Particularly interested in how people use feature flags on the frontend.
Does your team use them? If not, why not?
Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
1–10 of 143 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#2Yep. Some features are complex and cannot be completed in one sprint. On the other hand, we have constantly changing front-end code and leaving code in a branch too long might make it drift and might get broken in a lower-layer change because constantly syncing gets annoying. The other case is when the front-end is ready but the back-end is not or there is a public announcement that is scheduled for a later date.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#3Yes. some features are just best tested incrementally
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#4The team uses them. Outside of looking for bugs I still have not been convinced that it is useful to check if blue versus green button has useful conversion rates.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#5Yes.
Put simply it disconnects merge and deploy from launch. This is very useful when your changes rely on other teams or third parties having gone live. Having a feature flag (we call them toggles) lets you get it into production turned off, without having to coordinate deploys with other systems.
The downsides are it is extra development overhead and adds tech debt (you should go back in and remove the toggles after a successful launch). Generally we try to devise a solution that can be deployed safely without a feature flag but they are often required.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#6Our team uses them extensively. It's also tied to our A/B and QA testing infrastructure as it performs a similar function of "turn this/that on/off for these particular users". This enables us to do continuous deployment (dead/unfinished code goes to live all the time) and running QA for features on live infrastructure that has actual production loads.
It's also a life saver when issues arise, though the correct term for this is "operational toggles". Flip a switch when functionality is causing issues and it's gone.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#7The team uses them. Outside of looking for bugs I still have not been convinced that it is useful to check if blue versus green button has useful conversion rates.
That's A/B testing, not feature flags. Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30115276 for a description of how feature flags are used.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#8I haven't seen them used on any of the projects I've worked on. HN is really the only place I regularly hear about feature flags, actually.
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#9We use them not as an A/B testing tool as I saw it suggested in a comment but more like a way to have controlled rollouts of features. As our team uses trunk based development we don't have a "development" branch so everything goes to master (we have a staging env and manual judgement prior to production deployment tho)
Re: Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?
#10Not all projects are of the same duration or complexity. Most of the features get developed in a 2 week sprint, but from time to time, there are projects that take a month or so. When there are multiple teams with different working schedules, feature flags add a lot of value during deployments and reduce the dependencies on other teams. The business/product benefits that arise from feature flags are equally valuable.