A toggle is a switch that has two positions, on and off. It’s used in everyday technology as well as software applications to enable a feature or option. Toggle switches are commonly found in electronic devices and computers to turn WiFi on or off, for example. Toggles are also often used in programming and development to allow engineers to test ideas for improvement. They provide a way for teams to experiment with changes without the risk of rolling out a new version to all users.
Feature Toggles are powerful tools that can help you move faster and deliver better experiences for your customers. They provide an easy way to experiment with changes, validate features with a small segment of your audience and act as circuit breakers during periods of high load or performance issues in your application. But as your organization grows and you build more toggles, the code will become cluttered and it’s important to manage them effectively.
In the past, many teams managed their feature toggles with hardcoded if-else statements in their codebase. This is often referred to as “debugging code” because it enables devs to quickly make changes in production by changing the state of the flag. This approach is cumbersome as your program scales and often leads to duplication of logic.
The other option is to store your feature toggle configuration in a centralized config store, like an existing application database. This approach provides greater agility but requires that you implement some sort of admin UI for system operators, testers and product managers to view and modify toggle configuration.
Many organizations choose to use a combination of approaches that provide advantages of both static and dynamic toggle configuration management. For example, a team may store a toggle’s configuration in a static file and use a preprocessor’s #ifdef feature to create an expression which can be changed at runtime. This is a good option for shorter-lived toggles and is sometimes combined with an approach that stores the toggling decision as part of the release version (e.g. Canary Release or Champagne Brunch).
Another common approach is to use a service like Kameleoon to store and manage your toggles. With Kameleoon, you can query your centralized feature flag store at runtime to determine if the toggle is set to ON or OFF. When you change the state of a toggle from ON to OFF in Kameleoon, your tool will be instructed at runtime to turn off the associated function. In addition, you can easily remove old and obsolete toggles to reduce technical debt in your application. Ultimately, the best approach is to find a solution that suits your organizational needs and ensures you follow the same principles of feature toggle management described in this article. This will allow you to scale your deployment processes and improve the quality of your software faster.
