Software development with feature toggles: practices used by practitioners

Mahdavi-Hezaveh, Rezvan; Dremann, Jacob; Williams, Laurie

doi:10.1007/s10664-020-09901-z

Cited by 26 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In our study, we could observe an increase in defects (Finding 7), which might be a consequence of inappropriate control of toggle debt. The results presented by Mahdavi‐Hezaveh et al 37 seem to reinforce this. They performed a survey with 20 practitioners from at least 17 different companies that use feature toggles.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 61%

How the adoption of feature toggles correlates with branch merges and defects in open‐source projects?

2021

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Branching has been widely adopted in version control to enable collaborative software development. However, the isolation caused by branches may impose challenges on the upcoming merging process. Recently, companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Spotify, among others, have adopted trunk-based development together with feature toggles. This strategy enables collaboration without the need for isolation through branches, potentially reducing the merging challenges. However, the literature lacks evidence about the benefits and limitations of feature toggles to collaborative software development.Objective/method: In this article, we study the effects of applying feature toggles on 949 open-source projects written in six different programming languages.We first identified the moment in which each project adopted a feature toggles framework. Then, we observed whether the adoption implied significant changes in the frequency or complexity of branch merges and the number of defects, and the average time to fix them. Finally, we compared the obtained results with results obtained from a set of control projects that do not use feature toggles frameworks. Results/conclusion:We could observe a reduction in the average merge effort and an increase in the average total time needed to fix defects after adopting feature toggles frameworks. However, we could not confirm that this increase was influenced by the use of feature toggles.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 61%

How the adoption of feature toggles correlates with branch merges and defects in open‐source projects?

2021

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“…Section 3.2). First, as in Listing 1, two feature toggles are defined, usually all of them within a single file for the whole system [13,23]. Then, as in Listing 2, they are used in a toggle point (i.e., if-else statement) to condition the activation of system features.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have chosen them mostly because all of them use feature toggles [13,15]. They are also popular projects with 4k, 1.9k, 13.4k, 18.2k and 136 stars, respectively, in their repositories 6 .…”

Section: Subject Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several works study or share the knowledge regarding different aspects of feature toggles, namely their good, bad, ugly practices [5], removal [10,24], common used practices by practitioners [13,22], wide usage in public projects [15], or differences and commonalities 1 They are also often referred to as feature flags, bits, gates, or flippers. with configuration options [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Interaction of Feature Toggles

Tërnava

Lesoil

Randrianaina

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 16th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems

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Feature toggling is a technique for enabling branching-in-code. It is increasingly used during continuous deployment to incrementally test and integrate new features before their release. In principle, feature toggles tend to be light, that is, they are defined as simple Boolean flags and used in conditional statements to condition the activation of some software features. However, there is a lack of knowledge on whether and how they may interact with each other, in that case their enabling and testing become complex. We argue that finding the interactions of feature toggles is valuable for developers to know which of them should be enabled at the same time, which are impacted by a removed toggle, and to avoid their mis-configurations. In this work, we mine feature toggles and their interactions in five open-source projects. We then analyse how they are realized and whether they tend to be multiplied over time. Our results show that 7% of feature toggles interact with each other, 33% of them interact with another code expression, and their interactions tend to increase over time (22%, on average). Further, their interactions are expressed by simple logical operators (i.e., and and or) and nested if statements. We propose to model them into a Feature Toggle Model, and believe that our results are helpful towards robust management approaches of feature toggles. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Maintaining software.

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“…The pieces of code can be marked at the granularity of a single line of code or to a whole file. Feature toggling is also a used annotative approach (Mahdavi-Hezaveh et al 2021) where there is no need of specific variability management libraries as the annotations are based on the standard if clauses of the target programming language.…”

Section: Annotative Splsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open-source software product line extraction processes: the ArgoUML-SPL and Phaser cases

et al. 2022

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Software Product Lines (SPLs) are rarely developed from scratch. Commonly, they emerge from one product when there is a need to create tailored variants, or from existing variants created in an ad-hoc way once their separated maintenance and evolution become challenging. Despite the vast literature about re-engineering systems into SPLs and related technical approaches, there is a lack of detailed analysis of the process itself and the effort involved. In this paper, we provide and analyze empirical data of the extraction processes of two open-source case studies, namely ArgoUML and Phaser. Both cases emerged from the transition of a monolithic system into an SPL. The analysis relies on information mined from the version control history of their respective source-code repositories and the discussion with developers that took part in the process. Unlike previous works that focused mostly on the structural results of the final SPL, the contribution of this study is an in-depth characterization of the processes. With this work, we aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the strategies for SPL extraction and their implications. Our results indicate that the source code changes can range from almost a fourth to over half of the total lines of code. Developers may or may not use branching strategies for feature extraction. Additionally, the problems faced during the extraction process may be due to lack of tool support, complexity on managing feature dependencies and issues with feature constraints. We made publicly available the datasets and the analysis scripts of both case studies to be used as a baseline for extractive SPL adoption research and practice.

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Software development with feature toggles: practices used by practitioners

Cited by 26 publications

References 14 publications

How the adoption of feature toggles correlates with branch merges and defects in open‐source projects?

How the adoption of feature toggles correlates with branch merges and defects in open‐source projects?

On the Interaction of Feature Toggles

Open-source software product line extraction processes: the ArgoUML-SPL and Phaser cases

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