Toggle is a tool for technology leaders to understand how their teams work together to make products.

Toggle examines the unique partnerships that technology teams form with their trusted vendors and service providers to dig out of technical debt and deliver on productivity goals. Toggle covers everything from the nitty-gritty technical details of how to manage an IT infrastructure, to best practices for collaborating with a team of engineers.

A toggle is a switch with two positions: on and off. The word itself is derived from the Latin term for to turn, to change from one state to another.

When used in software design, a toggle is a boolean variable that allows programmers to control the behavior of their applications using a simple binary decision. Toggles are useful because they provide a way for developers to avoid complex logic, such as multiple conditional branches.

As a result, they are easier to understand than traditional “if” statements and allow code to be written more concisely. Toggles are a good choice for simple decisions, but they are not ideal for boolean logic that requires more complex conditions. This kind of logic is better suited for the “flag” concept, which is a more appropriate name when code is turned on and off by a variety of conditions.

While the advantages of toggles are obvious, they can be difficult to use effectively if not designed well. When creating a toggle, it is important to choose a meaningful color and text label that will convey the desired state. In addition, it is important to consider the societal and cultural implications of each state. For example, using red as an on position can be confusing for users with color blindness or who may associate it with stop signs and traffic signals.

It’s also important to ensure that the toggle configuration that you intend to release in production is tested thoroughly. This is especially true if you are testing a feature flag that will replace existing or legacy functionality with new behavior. This will help ensure that the new behavior works as expected in production without impacting existing user experiences.

Finally, it’s important to avoid using a toggle to control more than a single feature at a time. It can be easy to confuse your team and create chaos when you use a toggle to enable or disable large swaths of functionality. It’s also more difficult to debug the impact of a toggle if it affects many different features simultaneously.