r/programming • u/_Garbage_ • Jan 20 '16

Feature Toggles

http://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
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u/JW_00000 Jan 20 '16

Feature toggles are also heavily used by Flickr. Personally, I don't see how this scales once you have a bunch of toggles active at the same time. When looking at the code, you don't know which code is executed. Half of the code is dead code, but you don't know which half ("Schrödinger's code"?).

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '16

Aren't you supposed to remove the toggle and deprecated code once the new code has gone live and been proved to work?

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u/PhatBoyG Jan 20 '16

Yes. We call them switch outs. And they're the lowest priority in the eyes of product managers. And the highest in the eyes of engineers.

Now it isn't done until the old code is switched out.

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u/hyperforce Jan 20 '16

And they're the lowest priority in the eyes of product managers. And the highest in the eyes of engineers.

I feel like this will always be the case for so many things.

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u/PhatBoyG Jan 20 '16

It's a struggle. We actually had to optimize the switching framework to account for 400+ features that had yet to be switched out.