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Feature flags are great, but over time they could be turning your source code into spaghetti. Here are five critical signs that it’s time to invest in some feature management software.
For many engineering teams, feature flags are creating unnecessary complexity. While the freedom to progressively deliver features to users, test in production with less risk, and experiment with new features are all attractive, these steps create additional overhead for developer teams. Unless your team regularly dedicates time to auditing and removing old feature flags, there’s a good chance they’re adding to that technical debt pile.
Here are five tell-tale signs that your team could benefit from dedicated feature management software.
- You’re releasing multiple features at a time
Creating flags for multiple features across different teams can often result in unpredictable behavior, as they start to interact with each other in unexpected ways. When teams try to account for all these elements, maintaining product quality becomes a daunting challenge.
If your team manages simultaneous feature rollouts, a dedicated feature management tool offers greater visibility into feature flags, tests, and experiments across different environments and platforms, making things easier to manage.
- Your team needs to monitor feature performance
If your team is releasing multiple features at once, you need to be able to quickly identify which features are causing application errors and performance problems. Most feature management software gives teams the feature-level telemetry data needed to measure feature performance, remediate issues faster, and mitigate risk.
- Old feature flags are piling up
It’s fair to worry that by making feature flagging easier, that will encourage devs to use feature flags more liberally. This approach may seem counterintuitive when your team’s source code is littered with old, outdated, or unnecessary flags. However, for teams that have more than a handful of feature flags running, the answer isn’t always using fewer feature flags; it’s finding a better way to manage them.
If your team is concerned about breaking something every time they remove years-old flags – or if they don’t even have time to spend combing through the code to find those flags – it’s time to invest in a tool to help them. The ability to tag and search for flags is handy, and some feature management tools even offer notifications to remind teams to remove flags that are old or haven’t been used in a while.
- You want more control over rollouts
Staged releases work to limit risk and test new features on smaller user bases, but they don’t offer the granularity teams may want in selecting test groups.
If your team needs stronger user targeting, feature management platforms make it easier to create different user groups. More control over test users helps dev teams confirm that features are proving effective and useful for relevant users, not random ones. These tools also help teams manage different types of releases based on shared user attributes, entitlements, or use cases.
- You want more user feedback
A/B tests are great, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. If your team is craving better insight into user behavior, feature experimentation tools make it easy to create different beta user groups with robust user targeting to garner more relevant and granular feedback. Better performance analytics and user monitoring also help identify frustrations or roadblocks in the user experience.
Some feature flagging and experimentation tools even offer surveys and session recording to gain more insight into user behavior and experience, too. These features can help dev teams introduce more product experimentation into their approach.
Find the right feature management solution for your team
No engineering leader wants to sit through a dozen demos to identify the right feature management tool.
Now that you know your team is ready to take the next step, check out our buyer’s guide for feature management and experimentation software to discover what you need to look for.
