Why a Feature Toggle should be ‘OFF’ if it is undefined

When I first implemented some infrastructure supporting Feature Toggles I thought it was a good idea to have three states: on, off and undefined. If some code access a feature that is not defined it should throw an exception. The reason for this was that I used a fairly dynamic approach where a feature was identified by its name. This allows simple adding and removing of feature toggles without the static typing overhead. The drawback is that typing errors cannot be found by the compiler or interpreter, e.g. the feature is defined as “Toggle” but you write “togle”. In this case I thought it would be good to throw an exception.

But if you are developing a component that is is used in several applications than you have to define the feature in every applications configuration. Even if the feature should be disabled everywhere except in your test application. And if the feature is finished you have to remove the feature from all application configuration again. Error prone and time consuming.

Therefore an undefined feature toggle should always be treated as ‘OFF’.