In Continuous Delivery, Feature Toggles provide a useful way to turn on or off behaviour within your application. It provides tremendous value to QA by allowing progressive deployment of new features, enabling early customer testing while minimising impact of failure.While most QA and test managers want to delay release until certain that there are no major defects in the system, this can significantly stymie delivery and inhibit innovation. Feature Toggles allow new features to be deployed, but only exposed to limited users. In some cases this may be named users, internal user groups, or a limited slice or percent of the customer base. In this way, defects in new features have limited exposure and impact on the user base. This enables the new features to be tested on production environments, and also allows feedback from alpha and beta users on the effectiveness of new features.
Simplistically, a Feature Toggle is a if statement surrounding a new feature that determines whether the feature is exposed to the user or not. However, more powerful Feature Toggle libraries can use various aspects to determine whether the feature is exposed, such as:
- user credentials and groups
- employees,
- GEO location,
- Browser user-agent,
- percentage of users
- server load
- etc
Enabling features earlier in a controlled approach speeds up feedback from customers. For startups, and applications requiring innovation, often it is a greater risk that we are building the wrong product. Often much more significant that we are building the product right. In these situations we want to prioritise testing with real customers, getting feedback on the effectiveness of the features. This may be higher priority on whether there are defects in the feature construction itself. Getting user feedback early allows the user design of the feature to pivot, and we can return to other system tests once the feature user value has been fully realised.
Feature Toggles can be key to the A/B Testing process. Toggles can partition features depending on the A/B or multivariate segments. Performance measurements can then be compared between features exposed or hidden.
Adopting Feature Toggles has its gotchas that must be carefully managed. At some stage, features should be mainlined and the toggle taken out of the code, or where the feature is unsuccessful and toggles are off, the feature is removed from the code base.
Testing feature toggles also requires care. Integration tests will need to flick toggles between on and off to expose or hide the feature within tests.
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