Sample Feature Flag Scenarios

Different scenarios of when to use and design your feature flags

We have provided different scenarios to assist your understanding of feature flags.

Scenario
Company A, which operates a community site selling sports balls, wants to change its site's welcome image.

1. Selection of features

A feature flag has an on and off state.
You need to select a feature to apply when it is on and a feature to apply when it is off.
In most cases, the existing features are activated when the flag is off and new features are activated when the flag is on.

For new features, a developer is needed.
In addition to implementing new features, you need to integrate the Hackle SDK and write the code related to the feature flags.

Scenario
Company A's current welcome image is an image of a sports ball, but it is being reviewed to replace it with an image containing various sports in order to expand their business to other product categories in the future.
However, due to the nature of the ball game community site, the company is concerned that current users will have an adverse reaction to the new changes made.

Therefore, Company A decided to release the new changes to a small number of users through the feature flags feature.
The new image will be shown when the feature flag, and the old image when it is off.

2. Traffic configuration

Company A also has to decide on the number of people you want to release the feature to when it's on.
They also need to strategize the duration of time to observe the reactions, and how to increase or decrease traffic based on the reaction.

Scenario
The initial traffic allocation for the new feature was 10%.
Company A decided to look at the reaction to the new image by monitoring comments left on the popular posts page based on the new image. If there are posts regarding the new change within 2-3 days, they would be able to deem this as a quick response and adjust the traffic according to the reactions.
If there are no particular reactions based on the image, they have decided to monitor the situation for a week and gradually increase the traffic exposed by another 10%.

3. Draw conclusions

Once Company A gathered enough responses by adjusting the traffic, it's time to decide on which features to choose.
After this whole process and the full implementation of the features, the developer can now remove all the code affiliated with the Hackle SDK.

Scenario
We would like to leave the final outcome of Company A to your imagination.

After deciding upon which image to permanently adopt, the development manager of Company A will clean up the code related to the Hackle SDK