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Manage the Feature Flag Lifecycle

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Overview​

As you scale utilization, it becomes increasingly important to have a strategy for how to best clean up feature flags. This should be a consideration from the very first feature flag you create.

When creating new feature flags, there are a variety of reasons for placing a change or new feature behind a feature flag.

Feature flag types​

The three main types of flags to consider are the following:

  • Release Management feature flags:

    • Example: "I want to expose a feature flag to a subset of my traffic that meet a certain criterion (location, age, plan type)"
    • Example: "I want to safely do a progressive or gradual rollout for a potentially high impact feature, expose to 10% at first then gradually increase".

  • Experimental feature flags:

    • Example: "I want to learn if the new version of an existing feature, or an entirely new feature, has a positive or negative impact on my business metrics".

  • Operational Control feature flags:

    • Example: "If this feature were to have an issue, it could potentially impact revenue or conversions, I want the ability to quickly revert back to the previous steady-state".

Retire a feature flag​

Now that you have feature flags in production, what are the indicators you might establish for when to retire a flag?

  • Feature flags that have not been modified within the past 30 days are eligible for retirement.
  • Feature flags that have received no traffic in the last 7 days are eligible for retirement.
  • Metrics show that you the feature flag has proven the feature should be rolled out to everyone or removed from code = eligible for retirement.

To surface the feature flags that fall into the first two criteria, within the Environments tab in your Split dashboard, you have the option to filter by;

  • Active feature flags
  • Killed feature flags
  • Feature flags that have received traffic in the last 7 days
  • Feature flags that have received no traffic in the last 7 days
  • Feature flags that have seen no traffic at all
  • Feature flags that have been modified in the last 7 days
  • Feature flags that have not been modified in the last 30 days

For Consistency

Before removing a feature flag from code, ensure that everyone in the population is receiving the same intended treatment, essentially rolled out to 100%.

Integrate cleanup tasks into your project process​

  • As part of the project within the existing Jira ticket (or the feature tracking tool of your choice), you can create a subtask for retiring the feature flag with a specific due date or time period.
  • There could also be a subtask within the ticket that states a mandatory feature flag review/kill date.
  • Schedule a recurring cadence for the team to review and retire eligible feature flags.
  • Adopt a process to add a retire tag on the feature flag once the rollout or experiment is complete.
Harness FME self-paced training

For an interactive onboarding experience including further use cases and features like release monitoring, events, and metrics, check out the Harness Feature Management & Experimentation Feature Delivery Foundations for Admins & Product Managers certification.