Toggle is a control that allows users to change a state of something. It can be a setting, view, or content. Toggles are preferred over radio buttons on mobile devices because they take up less screen space. Toggles are also more clear in communicating what they do, compared to a checkbox that only indicates whether it is checked or not.

Toggles should be deployed and managed carefully. They can be a powerful tool for teams to quickly experiment with and release features that would otherwise have to go through a long development and testing process on code branches under more traditional waterfall development models. However, they can easily become confusing and difficult to manage if a team has too many toggles in production. This can lead to bugs that may not be discovered until it is too late, and creates a burden on other teams who need to work with those same toggles.

Best practice is to only deploy one toggle at a time, and limit the number of toggles in use to a reasonable amount. This helps keep the codebase clean and makes it easier for teams to understand what is causing bugs. It is also a good idea to have a process for vetting toggles before they are created, so that teams can be sure that they will be useful to their projects.

When using toggles, they should be clearly labeled with what they do and what state they are in at any given time. This ensures that users will be able to understand the effect of changing the toggle’s state. It is also helpful to use icons to communicate the toggle’s state, and to update the context of the toggle based on its current state.

Finally, it is a good idea to avoid using toggles in complex decisions that require more than a simple “if” statement. Instead, these decisions should be handled with a decision tree that uses a variety of conditions. Whether these conditions come from fitness tests of other features in the codebase, a flag set in the feature management software, or some other source, this will help make sure that only the appropriate features are being activated.

It is important to keep the toggle inventory as low as possible, and to remove old toggles as soon as they are no longer needed. This will minimize the amount of code that needs to be tested and debugged, and will reduce the burden on the team that manages the feature. Ideally, there should be a process for tracking and managing the lifecycle of these toggles, to ensure that they are removed as soon as their value has expired. This can be accomplished by adding a task to the team’s backlog, or by building the process into the feature management software.