Toggle is a term often used to describe switching back and forth between settings or programs. In software toggles allow you to enable and disable features. The idea behind a toggle is that when it’s pressed once it becomes active, and when pressed again it becomes inactive. This can be useful to control features that you don’t want to enable by default, like online poker or ad blocking software.
Feature toggles are a great tool for managing complexity in your continuous deployment workflow. They are especially useful when you need to validate a new feature with a small segment of users before rolling out to your entire audience. Using feature toggles allows you to avoid having an untested feature hit your whole user base and potentially cause confusion or frustration.
There are many ways to implement feature toggles, some of which are more dynamic than others. The simplest way is to hardcode the configuration of a toggle through comments or a preprocessor’s #ifdef, this approach can have issues with consistency and may require you to deploy an entire release in order to re-configure the toggle. Another option is to use a feature flag management platform, which can be more flexible and easier to manage.
One downside of toggles is that they are not always intuitive to use. This can be because they don’t have any clear text indicating the current state, and you have to rely on visual cues instead. Choosing the right visual cues is not as easy as it sounds, for example, using green and red can be confusing for some users with color blindness. The good news is that you can prevent these problems by ensuring that your toggles are well designed and implemented, and that they follow accessibility guidelines.
Another benefit of toggles is that they can help reduce technical debt by reducing the amount of code you have to maintain. By allowing you to switch features on and off, toggles can make your code more modular by separating different functions into their own independent modules. This can also make it easier to debug complex or buggy features.
Toggle can be a very powerful tool in your continuous development workflow, but it’s important to consider the risks of misuse before adding them to your application. Be sure to test your toggles thoroughly before rolling them out and remember that they are not intended to replace more traditional testing methods such as A/B tests or manual user experience reviews.
We recommend using a feature flag management platform, such as Kameleoon, to create and manage your feature toggles. This will allow you to create and manage the toggles in a central location, and to easily revert or remove them when needed. This can help you avoid technical debt and reduce the number of changes that need to be rolled out in future releases. It can also save time and effort by automating some of the manual processes you may need to do with a toggle-based system.
