3 ms·
How do you verify that everything is behind a feature flag? How do you verify that everything will work right once multiple feature flags are enabled? How muc
by jepler 7y ago
How do you verify that everything is behind a feature flag? How do you verify that everything will work right once multiple feature flags are enabled? How much of a negative effect do feature flags have for reasoning about the software? For binary bloat? For performance? Are ordinary devs capable of doing this properly, or just google's superhumans?
- Jach 7y agoTesting, and lots of it. How else? You can also expand the problem to general flags, not just WIP feature ones, and you have to deal with sellable/licensable flags, permission flags, version flags... Big software is going to run into complexity sooner or later. You don't need superhuman skill to manage it but no single person will be able to hold the whole thing in their head. An interesting approach to handling the combinatorial explosion of flags, if you desire to test all possible interactions (even though you don't typically need to) is instead limit yourself to the subset of all pairs of interactions (all-pairs testing).