7 Best Practices for Feature Flags

Introduction

Sometimes, there might be too much of a good thing, even when it comes to feature flags.

While we recognize the many benefits and uses feature flags bring to product and development teams alike, they also come at a heavy cost if not managed properly.

In the beginning of your feature flagging journey, things may seem simple enough. You might be starting off with a few if/else statements, but the more advanced your use cases become, the more complicated it gets to manage all the flags in your system.

As one flag quickly turns into 50, your flag count could eventually reach a number so high that you easily start to lose sight of all the flags you and your teams created resulting in “feature flag hell”. In other words, feature flags become a form of technical debt.

However, there are ways to keep technical debt at bay and that’s by ensuring you have an efficient tool in place that helps you keep track of all the flags you create and then remove them once they’ve served their purpose. In that sense, it’s important to remember to use feature flags carefully and strategically.

In this e-book, we provide you with our top feature flags best practices that you and your team should be aware of to avoid the pitfalls of feature flags and reap their rewards instead which include:

• Plan your feature flags carefully
• Name your flags consistently
• Set up and manage access control
• Limit and clarify the scope of each flag
• Clean up flags regularly
• Establish clear visibility of all flags
• Use a feature management tool