One of the
techniques we use to develop new features (which I cannot talk about) is
wrapping the new code behind what we call a Feature Flag. A feature flag is just a variable that we set
OFF while we are working on features to keep that code from running until we
are ready to turn it ON. This is
relatively basic engineering and there really is not anything special about it.
As a related note,
many Windows applications use a registry key to turn features on or off. We use a text file here with other data about
the flag stored in it. For example, we not only store the name of the flag, but
the name of the team that owns it, a short description of what it is for and
when we expect to be done.
In some cases, those
dates can be wrong or the name of the flag needs to be changed to make its
purpose more clear. For instance,
imagine this contrived example. A flag named "tooltip" is not all
that useful, but a flag named
"ShowAdvancedAnalyticsTooltipsForTheWebClients" is a bit more
explanatory. And if work finishes early
or lags behind estimated dates, those dates can change as well.
So this week I
expect to update these values (metadata) for our flags. This is very low priority work but with US
holidays approaching, now seems like the best time to get this knocked off the
to do list.
Questions, comments,
concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John
No comments:
Post a Comment