💃 Turn your code on with this trick 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Allow me to set a scene for you.

You’re working on a dev team that operates in 2 week sprints. You’re agile af … working on features in isolated branches, integrating code daily, CI/CD automation, daily stand ups, plannings, retros.

The works 💪 

All the sudden, your team needs to build out a larger feature. One that will take 4-6 sprints to complete. ⌛️ 

Meanwhile, the team is going to continue building out other small, yet valuable, features as normal. These typically take 3-5 days to complete.

How do you integrate this large feature into your release methodology?

❌ We can’t just stop all other work for 4-6 weeks while we build it - the business won’t have that

❌ We can’t spin up a SBX and build in isolation for 4-6 weeks - there still work being done to the existing codebase your new code needs to work with

✅ We can use a software engineering technique that will allow us to consistently release new code in a disable state - so we can iteratively deploy this new feature.

Today we’ll intro you to Feature Flags.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Feature Flags FTW!

• Gentle introduction

• Why should I care?

• Example implementation

• Takeaway

WHAT ARE THEY?

Gentle introduction

So what are these things? 🤷 

It’s pretty simple actually … feature flags control which code paths are active at any given time.

Also known as feature toggles, switchers, or flippers, these flags can be switched on and off — either at build time or at runtime — allowing devs to change the behavior of an application without having to update the code. 🧠 

It gives us the ability to ship incomplete features that remain dormant until they’re ready for action.

Once a feature is complete, then the code can be activated with the simple flip of a switch. 💡 

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

Why should I care?

In truth, feature flags can add a layer of complexity to your codebase.

Despite this, they are super powerful when it comes to software delivery:

✅ Short development cycle: without feature flags, you have to hold off deployment of a feature until it’s thoroughly tested — a process that can take weeks. With them, we can deploy several times per day, try partially-developed features, and get instant feedback. 💪 

✅ Simplified version control: we can do away with long-lived feature branches. Feature flags encourage the use of trunk-based development. We can merge every day, integrate continuously, minimize merge conflicts, and iterate much more quickly. ⏩️ 

✅ Test in production: I said what I said. Using feature flags means new features can initially be enabled only for developers and beta users. No separate testing environment is needed. 🔥 

✅ Rollback/Kill switch: if you have a bug in your new feature that made it through testing. Just flip the switch and iterate on the bug. 🤘 

✅ Separate deployments from releases: sometimes a feature is ready, but we’re quite not ready to publish it. Feature flags allow us to switch it on when it makes the most sense. 🤝 

SHOW ME THE CODE!

Example implementation

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here … 🛞 

If you’re in the Salesforce architecture or development space then you’re probably familiar with a dude named Pablo Gonzalez.

If not .. check him out. 👆️ He’s contributed a lot to DevOps, CI/CD, and Feature Flags! 🎏 

He’s also published an open source repo on GitHub with a simple framework for implementing feature flags driven by Custom Metadata and Custom Permissions.

It’s a clean, straightforward framework that can get your team up and running quickly!

BUTTONING IT UP!

Takeaway

Don’t sleep on feature flags! 😴 

If you’re working with a large dev team or have a feature that will take multiple sprints to complete then these will be your friend.

True, they can temporarily add to a system’s complexity, but in the end they will also bring it much more flexibility. 😄 

You can ship code more frequently, test in production, and wow your users by revealing a feature at the right moment. 💥 

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes