AlayaCare is transforming the home and community care industry with an end-to-end platform that helps improve patient outcomes for home-based care agencies. They serve over 700 care organizations and thousands of users across North America, Australia, and New Zealand. As their platform and customer base have grown, they’ve encountered a new challenge—how to scale software releases without disrupting care professionals who rely on their platform for critical healthcare service delivery.
In a recent blog post, "Establishing a Customer-Friendly Pace of Change Without Sacrificing DevOps Practices," Jean-Philippe Boudreault, Director of Product and Engineering, shared how they’ve adapted their approach to software deployment. With LaunchDarkly, they’ve reduced incidents, increased developer productivity, and boosted satisfaction ratings. Here’s how they did it.
Building deployment standards
For AlayaCare, releasing faster isn’t always better; their top priority is minimizing disruption on their platform. They coined a new phrase for their development philosophy: gentle deployment strategy, which categorizes releases as either events (major updates requiring thoughtful, deliberate coordination) or non-events (more minor, seamless changes). This shift allowed teams to manage triage deployments to keep momentum on development while reducing risk for users.
“Our mission is to empower care providers to achieve better health outcomes by delivering transformative technology and data insights, allowing them to focus on what truly matters. This can only be achieved if technology evolves at a pace manageable by care providers.” — Jean-Philippe Boudreault, Director of Product and Engineering, AlayaCare
Before standardizing their deployment approach, teams at AlayaCare struggled to coordinate releases across product and engineering. The lack of consistency made it difficult to track changes, troubleshoot issues, and measure the success of new releases.
“LaunchDarkly was implemented in late 2019, but until 2024, we didn’t have consistent practices around its use,” said Jean-Philippe Boudreault. “We started seeing significant benefits once we established standardized practices across product and engineering under the ‘gentle deployment’ mindset. Educating all teams and ensuring they were on the same page was challenging.”
Once they implemented a structured feature flagging process, the results were clear: developer time spent on coordinating releases and debugging customer-reported issues dropped by 15%.
Minimizing deployment risks with LaunchDarkly
Since adopting LaunchDarkly in 2019, AlayaCare uses feature flags for better control and flexibility in their deployment process. Their approach focuses on three key areas:
- Parent-child flagging: Linking customer event flags to monthly release flags delivers a staggered, controlled rollout across different customer regions.
- Standalone flags for minor updates: By deploying non-disruptive updates independently, teams can move faster without waiting for a full-scale release cycle.
- Proactive testing and monitoring: As their use of feature flags has become more sophisticated, and by tracking infrastructure performance, AlayaCare cut issue resolution time and prevented outages.
This strategy proved invaluable when investigating outages and catching issues before they escalated to a critical stage.
“When investigating outages, we noted that 45% required a significant volume of traffic or involved a specific data spread that could not be replicated pre-production. By tightening our use of LaunchDarkly feature flags and paying closer attention to signals related to error rate, infrastructure performance, and response time, we were able to prevent multiple outages and reduce resolution time by 50% when a flag was used compared to a classic deployment of new code.” — Jean-Philippe Boudreault, Director of Product and Engineering, AlayaCare
What’s next for AlayaCare
AlayaCare uses data from internal stakeholder surveys to track perceived release quality. This metric has significantly improved due to their new release philosophy—rising from an average score of 3/10 to regularly achieving 7/10 after implementing their gentle deployment strategy.
Looking ahead, Jean-Phillippe and the AlayaCare team are focused on continuing to improve through:
- Deeper Jira integration to further reduce manual coordination and streamline releases
- Better flag categorization to enhance tracking and visibility for all teams
- Improved flag housekeeping to reduce technical debt by removing outdated feature flags
As they continue to scale, AlayaCare sets the standard for software deployment in the healthcare space that can be both fast and safe—so care providers can depend on their platform, no matter what changes happen behind the scenes.
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