2018-09-28 Meeting notes - feature flags

Date

Sep 28, 2018

Where are we with feature flags after completing https://openlmis.atlassian.net/browse/OLMIS-4797
Lets look at some code - do we have exemplars? Would another developer know what to do?
Are they ready? If I wanted to make a release tomorrow, what do we need to do to make that happen?
Technical committee call is next Tue

Notes

env file based
Mateusz and Lukasz have used them for WIP outside the exemplars made
Other team members haven’t used them, we’re not using them as part of our standard process
Our examples didn’t pan out to be the ideal examples:
- Batch approve screen configuration is a feature onto itself, not what we should use a feature flag for. See this OpenMRS discussion.
- The search flag has been in place for a long time - it’s ending up as a configuration flag and not a short feature flag

Problems:

Bigger features (smaller features seem simple) - lots of places, lots of conditional checks
To read it from a property (env file), it needs to be a spring bean - not just any old POJO

Next steps:

There’s considerable concern with feature flags and trunk based development.
We need to try it - start using it to find: the right size recommendations, how annoying developers find it, etc. We need real experience.
We should improve the reading of feature flags - a bean that reads the property and returns a singleton for example. We can also look at projects like Togglz

@Wesley Brown and @Josh Zamor to schedule meet to discuss trunk based development, feature branches, flags, etc

@Josh Zamor to schedule a followup discussion on how we gain experience