It is interesting to watch the growth of an idea over time. The idea of using flags in code to do different things is as old as programming itself. Old-school configuration files used them, and they worked, so they were adapted. Thing is, given an idea that works, humanity inevitably takes it too far, and […]
DevOps: Get the Basics Right to Avoid Costly Mistakes
It is a truth of both agile and DevOps that speed is of the essence. This is a relative statement—some apps/portfolios/orgs envision speed completely differently than others—but if you are releasing more frequently than you were in the past, thanks to DevOps, that’s kind of the point. Yet, we see a whole selection of things […]
5 Best Practices for Feature Flagging
Feature flags, also known as the feature toggles, are important concepts in the field of DevOps. They have been around for a long time and have been used continually by developers for their convenience. As software development services providers are striving for higher agility, practices such as feature flagging are becoming increasingly relevant. If you […]
An Embarrassment of Riches
History says people rarely appreciate what they have in the heat of the moment. Our highly connected and high-speed world is no exception to this rule. The things that frustrate us are in our faces, while the things that make nearly everything better/safer/faster are taken for granted. That is every bit as true in IT […]
The Relationship Between Feature Flags and DevOps
From 2017 I’ve started most DevOps conversations with, “DevOps is now boring, and I love it!” What I mean by boring is that we are arguing less and less about why you should embrace DevOps principles and practices and having more and more conversations about how to implement DevOps in the real world. As a […]
Split Software Adds Feature Monitoring to Feature Delivery Toolset
One of the issues that has long plagued both development and test is determining exactly where problem code exists. The increasing rate of change that agile and DevOps have brought to projects makes this problem worse than ever because changes today can impact code from yesterday–or yesteryear. The constant flux that modern software is in […]
How Product Managers Can Take Back Control with Feature Flags
Product managers live in a high-speed world and are always focused on releasing the most impactful features in the shortest amount of time. Since users have grown accustomed to regular UI updates and bug fixes completed in near real time, this frenetic pace at which product managers work will only increase. The process of pushing […]
CloudBees’ Acquisition of Rollout: The CEOs’ View
As Mike Vizard reported yesterday, CloudBees, as part of its mission to build “the world’s first end-to-end automated software delivery system,” announced another acquisition: Rollout, a developer of a feature flag application that allows for simplified testing of new modules within an application. Not to repeat the gist of Vizard’s article; you can read it […]
DevOps Tools Democratize the View From Both Sides
How modern product decisions platforms marry the key metrics of features changes to organizational KPIs In 1967, Joni Mitchell released one of her most iconic songs, “Both Sides Now.” The song was inspired by the book, “Henderson the Rain King,” in which author Saul Bellow writes about flying to Africa and looking out the plane […]
Feature Flagging Poised for Wider Adoption
Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, provide a means for DevOps teams to test and add new capabilities to their applications without having to take the entire application offline. The downside is they generally result in more branches of applications that need to be carefully managed within the context of a DevOps process. A […]