“So, you’re completely Agile now. Your retros are humming and produce actionable improvements. Your demos slay the audience. Your goals are met. Your teams are jamming together. Your team ships features weekly, daily, even hourly. Okay, maybe they ship code a little TOO fast, really, and the business would LOVE a hand brake — sometimes — for the release of these fantastic features and get early feedback from a subset of customers and other stakeholders. And let’s be honest, Marketing would REALLY like a big reveal… And how does Quality test the things for real outside of production?

Feature flagging is a technique that developers can use to gate the availability of specific features from general availability and target them at specific customers, environments, and deployments. While it’s not a new technique in software development, it’s generally considered an “advanced feature” that teams fail to consider as an agile practice that they can implement early on. But it’s actually fairly easy, provides instant value, and even makes the developers’ lives easier!

In this talk, I’ll walk through what feature flagging is, how it can be implemented by examining a concrete example, and the benefits this technique provides so your team can provide more agile and incremental feature releases today.”