Software Development with Feature Toggles: Practices used by Practitioners

Abstract

Background: Using feature toggles is a technique that allows developers to either turn a feature on or off with a variable in a conditional statement. Feature toggles are increasingly used by software companies to facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery. However, using feature toggles inappropriately may cause problems which can have a severe impact, such as code complexity, dead code, and system failure. For example, the erroneous repurposing of an old feature toggle caused Knight Capital Group, an American global financial services firm, to go bankrupt due to the implications of the resultant incorrect system behavior. Aim: The goal of this research project is to aid software practitioners in the use of practices to support software development with feature toggles through an empirical study of feature toggle practice usage by practitioners. Method: We conducted a qualitative analysis of 99 artifacts from the grey literature and 10 peer-reviewed papers about feature toggles. We conducted a survey of practitioners from 38 companies. Results: We identified 17 practices in 4 categories: Management practices, Initialization practices, Implementation practices, and Clean-up practices. We observed that all of the survey respondents use a dedicated tool to create and manage feature toggles in their code. Documenting feature toggle's metadata, setting up the default value for feature toggles, and logging the changes made on feature toggles are also frequently-observed practices. Conclusions: The feature toggle development practices discovered and enumerated in this work can help practitioners more effectively use feature toggles. This work can enable future mining of code repositories to automatically identify feature toggle practices.