What LaunchDarkly Learned from 'Eating Its Own Dog Food'

Feature flags — the on/off toggles, written in conditional statements, that allow organizations greater control over the user experience once code has been deployed — are proliferating and growing more complex, and demand robust feature management, said Karishma Irani, head of product at LaunchDarkly, in this episode of The New Stack Makers. In a November survey by LaunchDarkly, which queried more than 1,000 DevOps professionals, 69% of participants said that feature flags are “must-have, mission-critical and/or high priority” for their organizations. “Feature management, we believe, is a modern practice that's becoming more and more common with companies that want to deploy more frequently, innovate faster, and just keep a healthy engineering team,” Irani said. The idea of feature management, Irani said, is to “maximize value while minimizing risk.” LaunchDarkly uses its own software, she said, and eating its own dog food, as the saying goes, has paid off in gaining insights into user needs. As part of LaunchDarkly’s virtual conference Trajectory in November, Irani joined Heather Joslyn, features editor of The New Stack, for a wide-ranging conversation about the latest developments in feature management. This episode of Makers was sponsored by LaunchDarkly. Karishma Irani - @karishma_irani Heather Joslyn - @ha_joslyn The New Stack - @thenewstack