Scaling Feature Flags eBook: A Roadmap for Safer Releases & Faster Development
I’m excited to share this collaborative guide from Flagsmith (featuring insights from OpenFeature & eBay) on how to scale feature flags while fighting vendor lock-in!
As engineering teams contend with the constant demand for increased speed and efficiency in their development practices, the rules around compliance and security remain rigid. This presents one of the core problems we see teams struggling with today:
How can we move fast, with safety?
Pete Hodgson, OpenFeature Governance Board Member, poses this question in his foreword for the new guide the Flagsmith team put together with OpenFeature and eBay.
For large organisations operating in complex or regulated environments, the question is particularly salient. Feature flags form part of the answer (in support of Continuous Delivery), but only if introduced in the right way. Large organisations face a steep learning curve when introducing any new technology, and feature flags are no exception.
Because feature flags live deep in your codebase, it’s important to introduce them in a thoughtful and strategic way, avoiding locking you into bad habits or specific vendors.
Feature flags are more of a social innovation than a technical one. Their real magic is revealed when they’re introduced to an organisation at scale—impacting the very way software gets built. The technology is only half the battle. Determining how to use it, who can use it, and how to drive adoption successfully is just as important.
Building a strong foundation for feature flags
Doing a good job of introducing any new technology into a large organisation starts with people—the people behind the technology and the internal teams who will adopt it.
Introducing feature flags will fundamentally change the way you build software, so pulling in the right stakeholders from the beginning is important. Start by creating a working group with representatives from your engineering, QA, product, and DevOps/infrastructure teams.
Additionally, you’ll need full executive buy-in to bring flags on at scale. This is true from a budget perspective but, just as importantly, from a time perspective, too. Part of the reason the eBay team was so successful with their OpenFeature adoption is because they were given full license to use engineering hours to get it done.
Budget for this time up front and create a plan with specific milestones and owners—as well as a strict timeline, so that the project keeps moving forward. Ensure this plan is shared at a company level, so that those involved are motivated to stay on time and on track.
eBay leaned into three main levers to drive organisational-wide adoption:
- Identifying initial influencers to pilot with: They identified key internal influencers, working to form a group of diverse and motivated individuals. Gradually, as the team collected and iterated on initial feedback from these developers, they prepared to scale it to other teams.
- Scaling the pilot programme: They identified 21 different teams to run multiple pilots with to learn and create the roadmap for a feature flag MVP. They did three rounds of pilots over three quarters, focusing on building product-market fit internally:
- Finding success & building the MVP: Once they had completed the final round of feedback, they started preparing the MVP, which, once ready, they had to roll out to everyone. No small feat at a company the size of eBay.
Tailoring feature flags to your organisation’s needs
As you begin to determine how to introduce feature flags into your release processes, ensure your team is familiar with the different kinds of flags as well as best practices to keep your flags healthy and reduce tech debt. Feature flags can become an anti-pattern if over-engineered, so be sure to familiarise yourself with the different types of flags and lifecycles.
Another best practice for getting up and running with flags is to identify the simplest possible use case, start there, and then gradually introduce them more widely and in more complex use cases.
Creating governance for your feature flag usage is going to be a key part of this adoption. This article is a sneak preview of the full guide on scaling feature flags.
If you enjoyed it and want to read on, you can download the full (ungated) guide with the case study here.