A toggle is a button, switch, or control that lets you change between two states or options. They are commonly used in technology, computing, and programming to allow users to switch between different settings and modes.
Feature toggles are a powerful tool for testing new features with real users before they go live in production. They work by bucketing your user base into two groups: one group sees a version of the app with the new feature enabled and the other group sees the old version of the app with the new feature disabled. By using feature toggles you can test a new feature with real users without risking any revenue or causing any customer friction.
When used correctly, toggles can be a great way to improve the usability of an interface, reduce page clutter, and create a cleaner and more intuitive design. However, it’s important to keep in mind that toggles shouldn’t be used for every situation and can easily be overused.
In order to make sure that your toggles are effective, they must be clearly labeled and well-designed. You can do this by making the toggles consistent with the rest of the interface and using visual cues like color changes or animations to indicate the toggle’s state change. Toggles should also be made accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This means using proper labels and providing alternative text for screen readers.
Many software teams use feature toggles to perform multivariate or A/B testing. In this type of testing, each user of the system is placed into a cohort and then routed down one or more code paths based on their interaction with an experiment. By comparing the aggregate behavior of each cohort with and without the experimental feature, you can see which variant is most effective.
Savvy teams treat their toggle inventory as something that comes with a carrying cost and strive to minimize it. To this end, they often add a task to the backlog to remove any toggle configuration that is expected to be removed at some point in the future. Some even put “expiration dates” on their toggles, so that their tests will fail if the toggle is not removed by a given date.
Toggles are a valuable tool for maintaining and recovering your application when you’re experiencing high latency. By allowing you to roll out/back features without impacting the majority of your userbase, they help you maintain stable code during critical maintenance periods. When used effectively, toggles can also be very helpful in shortening your deployment cycles. If you’re developing your application using a trunk-based development approach, they can also be a valuable tool for managing the flow of feature changes between releases and helping you to mitigate bugs that would otherwise require lengthy debugging and release delays.
