I'm working in company that releases every two weeks with the goal to do weekly releases and eventually daily releases. We introduced Feature Toggles for the development of features that overlap a release without destroying Continuous Integration.
Recently I noticed that people start using Feature Toggles for features that take only a few hours to implement. In this case the effort to setup, configure and test the Feature Toggle is easily more than 50 percent of implementation effort. It would be much more efficient to create a branch and merge it one or two days later back to the trunk. The cost for having no continuous integration is less than the cost for using a toggle in this case.
Why are people doing this? One answer could be that they are entrapped by the possibility to dynamically turn features on or off. Another is process thinking: because there was a process that enforced feature branches for feature development it is believed that you now must use Feature Toggles. Another company specific reason is that we had feature branches coupled with a heavyweight process (including the setup of a complete cloned environment with automatic builds, databases, dozens of service, ...) that was so painful that everybody shivers when hearing the word Feature Branch.
Make sure that you are using feature toggles and feature branches for the right things. A lightweight feature branch needs much less brainpower than implementing of a toggle for the modification of an legacy feature.
No comments:
Post a Comment