Edith Harbaugh, CEO LaunchDarkly discusses the cultural changes that happen - not just in engineering but across the organization - when you add feature flagging to your development cycle and stop relying on long-lived branching. This presentation is from DefragCon 2016.

1. Cultural Changes of
Feature Flagging
Edith Harbaugh, CEO
edith@launchdarkly.com
@Edith_H
November 2016

2. Edith Harbaugh LaunchDarkly CEO & Cofounder
Engineering Vignette, Epicentric
Product TripIt, Military.com, Easybloom
Marketing, Sales Concur
Writer DevOps.com, Dzone, ReadWriteWeb
Podcast Host “To Be Continuous”
Patents Deployment Management
BS Engineering Harvey Mudd College
2

3. 3
Product
Dev
QA
Ops
Marketing
Launch

4. Marketing: unable to predict future
4
Product
Dev
QA
Ops
Marketing
Launch
• Too visionary or too slow
• Aim once, hit once – no time to tune message
or positioning
Waterfall release every three years is dead.

5. 5
• We do/don’t need social
• Of course we need a single page app
Product: Changing use cases
Product
Dev
QA
Ops
Marketing
Launch
Waterfall release every three years is dead.

6. Dev: Teams Fracture
6
Product
Dev
QA
Ops
Marketing
Launch
• Front end, back end, APIs all in different
directions
• Branch hell with service packs, back ports
Waterfall release every three years is dead.

7. Ops: Hell
7
Product
Dev
QA
Ops
Marketing
Launch
It’s broken, fix it now!
Waterfall release every three years is dead.

8. Feature flagging: move faster
with less risk
• Built in-house by
Facebook, Twitter, Netflix
• Separate code from
business logic
• Push functionality to
who you want,
when you want
8
Feature
Flagging
Product
Dev
QA
Ops

9. 9
Ops controls access to features

10. 10
Dev controls access to features

11. 11
Business granted control over
software

12. 12
Product controls access to
features

13. 13
Marketing controls access to
features

14. 14
Sales controls access to features

15. Developers gain control over
software

16. Questions + Resources
• Feature Flagging Guide:
https://launchdarkly.com/guide/
index.html
• To Be Continuous Podcast: http://
www.heavybit.com/library/
podcasts/to-be-continuous/
16

17. Powering software organizations
to launch, measure & control features
Edith Harbaugh, CEO
edith@launchdarkly.com