Toggle is a tool to enable teams to build and deploy features in small increments. When used well, it can make development and QA more efficient. However, it can also lead to technical debt if not managed appropriately. By categorizing toggles, keeping code clean, and regularly auditing and removing them, you can avoid this potential for clutter.
Toggles are a useful way to update settings, views, and content without disrupting the user’s journey through the site or app. To ensure your toggles are working as intended, it is important to clearly identify the setting, view, or content that a toggle controls and provide a consistent interface for updating it. Toggle switches should look like sliders, utilize visual cues to indicate their current state, and deliver immediate results so users can feel confident they’ve made the right choice.
Typically, we use toggles to test the impact of a change or experiment on users. For example, an e-commerce company may set up a configurator with two different suggestion algorithms. They can then run an A/B test to see which algorithm generates more orders. Once the data is conclusive, the team can remove the experiment toggle and implement algorithm B for all users.
Toggling is also a great way to support agile development methodologies. Under more traditional waterfall models, a feature would need to be developed on a separate branch of the code before it could be merged into trunk. By using feature toggles, developers can quickly and reliably deploy new features to users while the rest of the product continues to be built on top of it.
When a toggle is unused for an extended period of time, it can lead to confusing confusion for developers and users. To avoid this, it is good practice to remove old toggles as soon as they’ve reached the end of their lifecycle. This can be done by adding code cleanup tasks to your sprints or by building a process into your management platform.
It is also recommended to create a toggle configuration and fall-back configuration for each release of your software. This helps prevent feature toggles from accidentally getting flipped off in production during the testing phase. This can be especially problematic if your toggle configurations are not versioned in source control.
A toggle configuration is a centralized place for storing the state of your feature flags. It is also a great idea to keep the number of toggles in your configuration small, so that they don’t become difficult to manage and maintain.
It is also important to test the toggle configuration that you expect to be rolled out in production, as well as a default or fall-back configuration where all of the toggles are flipped On. This will help prevent unexpected regressions in future releases. Many teams find it helpful to also perform a small percentage of tests where all of the toggles are flipped Off in order to test how their existing or legacy behavior will behave in the absence of any future toggles.