We believe that feature management is well-established as a best practice for high-velocity engineering teams to reduce risk, improve productivity, and enhance customer experiences. In fact, many of our customers gate every single feature release behind a flag to ensure they can de-risk their releases and release software confidently.
But with scale comes additional complexity. Conducting feature management at enterprise scale requires you to consider things like how to efficiently remove stale flags, follow an organization’s change management best practices, and develop a detailed understanding of how engineering and product teams are leveraging feature management and experimentation across the organization.
Today, we’re happy to announce several new features that address these important issues that arise at enterprise scale, making it even easier to efficiently manage releases across your organization:
Launch Insights Dashboard
The Launch Insights Dashboard, available now for users on every plan, is a top level view that gives you a better understanding of the quality and consistency of your release practices. The goal is to give you an easy answer to the question: “Are we doing great releases?”
The dashboard gives your organization an overall score across your usage of the LaunchDarkly platform, as well as across the categories of Release, Monitor, and Optimize.
In the Release section, you’ll get a summary of your usage that includes details about the capabilities you’re using to de-risk your releases. Initial metrics give you visibility into your total flags created, number of flags using segments and custom rules, and flags using release pipelines.
The Monitor section helps you understand how often you’re guarding releases throughout the defined time frame, and the Optimize section shows you how many experiments were run during the defined time window.
In the Trends section, you’ll see the number of flags that are ready for archival and code removal as a percentage of your temporary flags, as well as the number of users in your organization that have been active through the defined time period. Finally, the dashboard includes a leaderboard that ranks the users in your organization by flag creation.
Using the insights in the dashboard, you can make decisions about how to improve best practices in your organization and exactly how to operationally scale risk-free releases in your environments.
Learn more by reading the docs
Flag cleanup made easy with automated archival checks
What happens when you’re a large, high-velocity organization that puts every release behind a feature flag? Like a lot of our power users, you could quickly rack up tens of thousands of flags, some of which are old and need to be cleaned up. While ignoring this “chore” might seem harmless, the proliferation of stale flags can clutter the codebase, making it harder to read and maintain.
To solve this problem, we’re excited to introduce automated checks in LaunchDarkly to let you know when a flag is ready to be removed. That means that your team can more easily and proactively manage flag debt, contributing to a cleaner codebase and freeing up more time for building and shipping new products.
Learn more by reading the blog.
Custom Role Builder
Using the new Custom Role Builder (available to Enterprise plan customers), LaunchDarkly users can more easily create custom roles and policies for custom roles. Coming soon, we’ll introduce Global Roles as a way to reduce the number of custom roles your organization has, create roles more quickly, and more easily manage multiple teams across large organizations.
Learn more by reading the docs.
Test run flag targeting rules
You can now preview flag targeting rules (available via feature preview opt-in), in order to understand which variation a particular context will received for a given feature flag. This helps you validate that contexts will receive the flag variations you expect after you make targeting changes.
Learn more by reading the docs.
Updated ServiceNow integration and custom approvals integrations
With our new ServiceNow integration (available to Enterprise plan customers), you can automatically approve and apply changes in LaunchDarkly when they’ve been reflected in ServiceNow. If you have complex workflow management processes or approval requirements, you can also create your own custom approvals integration in LaunchDarkly to support any third-party tool or customization.
Coming soon, the custom approvals integration will be available natively in the ServiceNow marketplace as an official partner app. This will enable customer’s ServiceNow change management teams to easily setup and customize the LaunchDarkly integration directly within the ServiceNow UI.
Learn more by reading the docs.
With these new features, LaunchDarkly is setting the standard for efficient, scalable, and effective feature management across organizations of all sizes. Whether you’re looking to streamline flag cleanup, enhance visibility into feature management practices, simplify role management, or integrate seamlessly with change management systems like ServiceNow, these updates make it easier than ever to drive high-velocity, low-risk software releases.
Are you ready to see how these tools can transform your team’s development process? If you're not a LaunchDarkly customer yet, request a demo today and experience the future of feature management firsthand.
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