Update August 10, 2021: The Rollout Board is live. See the full capabilities here in the docs.
We often write about how feature flags have allowed product and engineering teams to save time and lower the risk of any release by separating feature release from code deploy. We haven’t touched on how this separation has created a situation where the processes and CI/CD tooling built to manage and automate deploys no longer provide the complete picture of what and when features are being released to customers.
This lack of visibility began to reveal itself almost two years ago when we first spoke with the LinkedIn team about the five phases of a feature launch that they used to manage their releases. Furthermore, what we’ve seen while working with customers is the rise of a release process that involves taking a feature flag from deployed in production at 0%, to 100% released, and eventually cleaned up in code. A process that is entirely separate from the deploy processes that have existed up until now.
Introducing Split’s Rollout Board with Customizable Statuses
To properly visualize this release process, we’re developing a Rollout Board feature that will allow you to quickly understand and manage the statuses that your feature flags and experiments go through. These statuses can be customized to reflect your team’s internal processes and requirements. The Rollout Board will address a critical need for many organizations, managing dozens and sometimes hundreds of active feature releases in our platform concurrently.
Product and engineering teams will be able to quickly understand where any given feature is in the release process to answer critical questions like:
- What features are ready or safe to ramp to more customers?
- When can I expect to be able to turn on this feature to all my customers?
- Which features might have been fully released for a while and are ready to be removed from our code?
Track the Entire Feature Delivery Lifecycle Across Your Teams
With the Rollout Board, scrum teams can plan and coordinate release tasks with marketing and sales. Any teammate can quickly determine if a feature flag or experiment is ready to move to the next status by checking on the number of days it has resided in its current status, as well as the last time it received traffic across any environment.
Once a feature flag or experiment is determined as ready to be moved to the next status, they can simply update its targeting rules and status in one step!
The Rollout Board is just the beginning for us as we continue to build out capabilities to allow teams to manage the feature delivery lifecycle at scale. We’ll be building out ways to automate and templatize this process, and we’re excited to see how our customers leverage this new feature!
Get Early Access
If you’d like to share your input and be the first to try the Rollout Board, be sure to sign up for our early access program!
Learn More About How to Manage and Govern Feature Delivery at Scale
There is so much more available today and coming in the near future that will help you and your team effectively manage and govern the feature delivery lifecycle. Be sure to check out the resources below, and of course, follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel!
- Stay Compliant with Feature Flag Approval Flows
- Go From PR to 100% Fast with ‘My Work’, Live Now
- Create Custom Policies for Automatic Approvals with ServiceNow and Split
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Deliver Features That Matter, Faster. And Exhale.
Split is a feature management platform that attributes insightful data to everything you release. Whether your team is looking to test in production, perform gradual rollouts, or experiment with new features–Split ensures your efforts are safe, visible, and highly impactful. What a Release. Get going with a free account, schedule a demo to learn more, or contact us for further questions and support.