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INTRODUCING HARNESS FEATURE FLAGS

Harness Feature Flags allows organizations to deliver features faster, with less
risk. Learn more and try it out today.

By Bhargav Brahmbhatt Last updated November 3, 2021


Harness Feature Flags is the newest addition to the Harness Software Delivery
Platform. This module allows organizations to deliver features faster, with less
risk.

2:38











SOFTWARE DELIVERY ALWAYS GETS FASTER

Companies constantly develop new software features for their customers.
Traditionally, these features are made available via a software deployment and
become visible to all users at the same time. 

As a result, every time a new feature is deployed, there is a risk that
customers will have a less than stellar experience due to a poorly-implemented
feature. The only way to fix a poorly-implemented feature is to immediately roll
back to the prior version, or to create a fix as quickly as possible and roll
forward by deploying a new version.

Within this traditional release process, many problems become apparent:

 * The risk associated with new feature releases ends up slowing down developers
   since they have to thoroughly validate design and implementation before
   releasing.
 * Often, there are multiple possible versions of how a new feature will look
   and function, and it’s up to the developer to choose one (not always the
   right one) and implement it.
 * The decision of when to release new software features is controlled by
   developers instead of the business.
 * Sunsetting old features introduces risk to newer features that might have
   dependencies on the old code.
 * It’s all or nothing – a feature is rolled out to everyone at the same time
   instead of incrementally rolled out for verification purposes.
 * When teams are beholden to engineering release cycles (e.g. once a month),
   multiple features are released simultaneously, introducing complexity and
   risk that can result in deployment war rooms, large rollbacks, and
   dissatisfied customers.

Said simply, it comes down to two things:

 1. Organizations need to deliver features faster while minimizing risk.
 2. Current tools and processes aren’t fast enough, yet still require a huge
    investment.

So how does an organization achieve higher engineering velocity without breaking
existing processes, and indeed, reducing deployment risk even further?

Source




OLD TOOLS CAN’T SOLVE NEW PROBLEMS

Companies today primarily try to solve these problems by repurposing their
existing release processes. This means that they’re using mature and oftentimes
complex methodologies to release features piecemeal or faster. Think of trying
to use a cannon to kill a fly – it can work, but it’s probably overkill. While
repurposing existing tooling can compensate in some ways, it ends up being very
expensive and may miss on the specific requirements for an individual feature
release.

Most companies are still not using feature flags. It is still not a
universally-adopted practice, although it’s on its way to being so. Clearly,
repurposing existing tools is not cutting it. And so teams need to find new ways
to solve the problem. Quickly.


ISSUES ON THE FEATURE FLAG MATURITY JOURNEY

The primary problem teams have is simply getting started fast and realizing
value. Teams can get bogged down in figuring out how to start, they can design
flags in counterproductive ways, and they can create future problems due to this
immaturity in the beginning.

For teams who are more mature with feature flags, there is a “best practices”
and management problem. Once a team has dozens or hundreds of flags, that means
there is a lot of stale code, not a lot of process for managing it, and teams
often struggle operationally to deal with this as part of a healthy workflow.

For some of the most mature teams, feature flags are often closely tied to their
software delivery process, but fundamentally disconnected from it due to the
existing vendors all being stand-alone tools. This means teams have to invest a
lot of time in wiring up feature flags with metrics systems, build systems, etc.
because the tools are not integrated natively. It also introduces significant
maintenance overhead to ensure all these systems continue to work together over
time.

So clearly, there are working solutions out there, but it seems they all have
their own problems…






HARNESS FEATURE FLAGS = MORE SPEED, LESS RISK

Harness Feature Flags started as an internal project to use feature flags with
our own software. The lessons learned from that project were applied to building
the customer-facing Harness Feature Flags – everyone gets to benefit from our
successes and failures. 

The Harness Feature Flags UI – designed for simplicity and speed.



In particular, Harness Feature Flags focuses on the following key concepts:

 * Developer Experience – Putting heavy emphasis on the developer experience to
   ensure the setup process is fast and intuitive, and that teams are able to
   get started and see value from feature flags right away.
 * Management & Governance – Letting teams build rules and processes and
   automating cleanup and flag lifecycle management. Ensuring teams can keep
   their systems secure, compliant, and standardized wherever possible is
   critical to their goals.
 * 2+2=5 – Leveraging the Harness platform, making it easy to build workflows
   that are otherwise very difficult and manual to build. While users don’t need
   to use other Harness products, they create a whole greater than the sum of
   the parts.






WHAT MAKES HARNESS FEATURE FLAGS UNIQUE?

While there are a variety of strong feature flag solutions in the market,
including in-house builds, they tend to miss the mark on some key requirements
for customers. Harness Feature Flags meets customers where they are in these
areas:

 * Simple UI-Based Feature Release Workflows – Customers have the ability to
   create templates and processes that they can standardize across feature flags
   that have the same operational needs. Feature flags are now included in a
   visual pipeline that includes steps related to governance and verification. 
 * Governance & Verification – Customers can ensure production pushes always
   meet defined organizational standards, and that they can minimize the
   negative impact of any issues in prod. Harness gives customers the ability to
   create controls in their feature release process, including mandating
   approvals and creating audit trails. In addition, customers can automate
   service verification once a feature is live, ensuring that if an issue
   occurs, the feature is turned off to minimize impact.
 * Integration Into CI/CD – Many feature flag tools separate feature flags from
   the rest of the software development lifecycle. This creates a problem for
   customers, who inherently view feature flags as just another stage of that
   lifecycle (many companies even repurpose their existing software release
   processes to mimic the functionality of feature flags). By representing
   feature flags as a pipeline, feature flag management becomes a natural step
   in the everyday workflow of development teams and is integrated into CI/CD as
   a unified pipeline.

Create visual feature release pipelines.




HOW TO GET STARTED

To get started with Harness Feature Flags, just sign up for a demo and a Harness
specialist will get you going.

Better yet, you’ll soon be able to get started with Harness Feature Flags in an
entirely self-service manner. Check back in a couple of weeks for even more
developer goodness!

You can also check out this video that walks through how Harness Feature Flags
is designed specially for developers.

START FREE TRIAL

Take a look at where major DevOps trends are headed, a common theme across many
tools and practices is improving the Developer Experience.

REQUEST A DEMO

Request your personalized demo of Harness, The Modern Software Delivery
platform, today.

DOWNLOAD OUR EBOOK

Take a look at where major DevOps trends are headed, a common theme across many
tools and practices is improving the Developer Experience.


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HARNESS PRODUCT UPDATE | MARCH 2022



Product Update March 2022: See what we’ve been up to and get updates on product
features, events, webinars, HarnessU, and more.



Last updated: March 30, 2022
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