Are You Following These Feature Flag Best Practices?

No matter where you are on your journey to true digital transformation via agile processes, progressive delivery, and rigorous testing, it's important that your team has the right tools to manage your feature delivery and measure business impact.

Take our assessment to find out where you are on the path, and stick around for key insights on how to progress.

Management, Organization and Coordination

Question 1

How do you track the state of your feature flags?

Organizations use up to 20% of the budget they dedicate to new products resolving problems related to technical debt. Monitoring and tracking can ensure feature flags are promptly updated or retired—before they cost you.

Select all that apply

Question 2

Which of the following pieces of information do you use to organize your feature flags, and easily locate/identify what each does?

Lack of documentation is among the top 10 challenges of developing an in-house feature flag solution.

Select all that apply

Question 3

What do you do to ensure all changes made to feature flags in production are reviewed for quality and compliance?

More than 80% of businesses find bugs and other errors after a feature is released. If changes to feature flags aren't reviewed before going live in production, chances are yours does too.

Question 4

Which of the following best describes your organization's approach to source/version control?

The majority of organizations (88%) say that a lack of technical knowledge or skill may be preventing them from practicing continuous delivery.

Security and Testing

Question 5

How often does your organization test in a production environment before releasing a new feature?

While 67% of organizations say they release new features every two weeks, 20% release features at least once per day. Testing in production can help you achieve a quicker cadence without compromising the user experience

Question 6

Who interacts with a feature in production before it is validated and rolled out to all users?

Almost half (41%) of organizations must either roll back or hotfix new features. If there's an issue with your code, would you want 100% of your users to encounter the issue or 1%?

Select all that apply

Question 7

When targeting feature flags, how is personally identifiable information (PII) and other customer data handled?

The cost of mishandling customer data can be steep — so you better make sure you're doing it right. GDPR fines, for instance, can reach up to 4% of a company's annual revenue.

Question 8

Which of the following types of experiments does your organization use to improve the user experience?

The more you experiment, the better. Studies have found that organizations that outperform their competitors are 2x more likely to run tests.

Select all that apply

Data, Measurement and Monitoring

Question 9

When testing new features, what experimentation best practices do you use to ensure reliable results?

Only 12-15% of all experiments result in success. That means 85-88% of tests fail to have their intended effect. It's a good thing learning from failure still counts as a win.

Select all that apply

Question 10

When do you decide to roll out a feature to a larger portion of users?

The highest-paid person's opinion isn't the only one that matters. A study from the Rotterdam School of Management found that projects managed by senior team members had lower success rates than those led by junior ones.

Question 11

How do you monitor feature performance and — more importantly — mitigate risks?

Quickly spotting errors is key to mitigating risks, but on average, 74% of organizations take more than an hour to detect issues within new releases — and 38% take more than a day.

Select all that apply

Question 12

How does your organization analyze behavior and performance data associated with a new feature?

The information you collect from flags can impact how you design and release new features — but that's not all. Data-driven organizations are also 3x more likely to report improvements in decision making.

Get Your Results

Question 12

Download your organization's feature flag maturity and key insights you can share with your team today.






Your Score

Novice

Your organization is in the Novice stage of feature delivery. You've got a great start, but there's more to be done. For many companies at the Basic stage, feature flag solutions are homegrown, and any amendments or additions are inevitably code-heavy, resource-intensive, and time-consuming.

Proficient

Your organization is in the Proficient stage of feature delivery. You have effective systems for tracking and managing your releases with feature flags but aren't yet monitoring the data you receive from them or engaged in A/B testing.

Expert

Your organization is at the Expert stage of feature delivery, congratulations!

A score this high is a sure sign you know what you're doing. Your organization has enabled top-of-the-line feature flag capabilities, and now it has nearly everything it needs for enterprise-scale and impact-driven development. Don't slow down just because you're ahead—technology moves fast, and there's more you can do to keep your business and your feature flag capabilities in the lead.

Question 12

Novice Doesn't = Bad

We call this stage Novice because it's the basis for future growth. You have a good foundation of knowledge and capabilities, but now it's time to build greater sophistication and scalability.

How to Become Proficient

Achieving the next stage, Proficient, means your flags have greater functionality in terms of testing and provide you with more granular insight into how features are performing. You've likely also introduced methods and processes that allow for more nuanced targeting.

Download your full results to learn more about this stage.

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When You're Proficient, Opportunity Abounds

If you're in the Proficient stage, you've moved beyond the simple feature flag functionality that can be built in-house, and purchased a solution with a permissioning system and granular targeting. You are also practicing progressive delivery and testing in production!

How to Reach Expert

Organizations at the Expert level have methodologies, systems, and practices in place that allow for sophisticated and continuous feature tests. They deliver on privacy and security without compromising scalability. Most of all, they're championing impact-driven development and positioning their organization as industry leaders.

Download your full results to learn more about this stage.

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You've Got the Tools, Now Let's Build the Culture

Best-in-class methodologies and tools allow you to accurately test every change you make to your user experience so you understand how best to empower customers, boost conversions, and level up your business. Now you just need to embed these capabilities—and an experimentation mindset—across your entire organization.

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