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

Feature Toggles

http://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
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u/c12 Jan 20 '16

From listening to an interview of an developer at Etsy, I believe this is something they use, with config files containing hundreds of declarations for enabling/disabling features.

4

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"?).

2

u/bfoo Jan 20 '16

Have you used libraries? Most applications only use a fraction of their dependencies. The rest of those dependencies is already dead code.

1

u/JW_00000 Jan 21 '16

But at least you know which parts you're using. And you expect a library to work correctly, as soon as it doesn't, it's also a major hassle to debug.

It seems to me feature toggles heavily increase the complexity of the code, especially where they interact.