Using feature flags to test in production
We are in an era of continuous delivery, where we are expected to quickly deliver software that is stable and performant. We see development teams embracing a suite of continuous integration/delivery tools to automate their testing and QA, all while deploying at an accelerated cadence. No matter how hard we try to mitigate the risk of software delivery, almost all end-user software releases are strictly coupled with some form of code deployment. This means that companies must rely on testing and QA to identify all issues before a release hits production. There are two key challenges when testing features in test environments:
- Testing in test environments can be challenging if your test scenarios depend on production-quality data. It can take a lot of effort to create this kind of data in test environments and it's likely you'll still miss out on key test scenarios, since in some cases the effort involved in creating this data outweighs the benefits...
