One thorny problem can delay an entire modernization program.
As your agency modernizes and migrates legacy systems to the cloud, it's common to run into roadblocks that slow down your progress or even grind your initiatives to a halt.
Without fully understanding or having visibility into legacy application components, agencies may take the wrong approach to migrating to microservices. Inconsistent release controls and all-or-nothing “big-bang” approaches make incidents likely.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the silent blockers slowing down application modernization in the public sector and demonstrate how an enterprise approach to feature management can help your agency overcome them.
But first, what is feature management?
Feature management is a new class of software development tools and techniques powered by feature flags. Feature flags are conditional statements (eg., if-else statements) in your code that allow developers and program managers to control features in a very precise and rules-based manner via a feature management platform. Modern feature management can enable you to standardize better management and control all of your agency’s software releases. Feature management can also help improve your continuous delivery practices and complement a DevOps or DevSecOps transformation. It enables your development teams to truly control software features at a granular level and frees them from managing the complexity of merging different software branches. Now we've defined feature management, let's explore the stealthy culprits that could be blocking your transformation initiatives.
Silent blocker #1: Inconsistent release controls
You may still have programs relying on integrated, archaic software development processes, which force your developers to wait until major version and QA team releases before moving to the next round of development.
In many cases, you may have hard-coded feature configurations that are hard-wired to specific applications, resulting in different release processes for different applications. You might even need a new release process for each new software application. This takes time and eats into program delivery schedules.
Additionally, these feature configs are often rudimentary and offer very little in terms of release control, user segmentation, or targeting. In this case, a software release is all or nothing to the production environment. This can create chaos in complex, legacy environments and is often the number one silent blocker to releasing the application upgrades that deliver true modernization benefits. Without fine-grained software release controls, you can't confidently manage agency and contractor access, which can also create delays or obstacles.
How feature management can help
Better control over software releases
With enterprise feature management, teams can manage software releases more granularly and responsively. Turn features on or off in real time based on cybersecurity concerns or other factors, providing greater flexibility and agility from pre-production testing to the full production environment.
Implementing a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly Federal enables your agency to deploy when developers want and release when the program team is ready. Agency teams can enable continuous or even progressive software releases by decoupling these deploy-release motions. This kind of flexibility can help your teams get new features in front of stakeholders quickly for feedback before it goes to production.
Improve continuous delivery practices
Feature management can also improve your agency’s continuous delivery practices, enabling your team to release software more frequently and confidently. Providing better control over feature access can help ensure that your agency’s development teams deploy software in a controlled and consistent manner, minimizing the risk of bugs and other issues.
With modern feature management platforms, your teams can control the lifecycle of any feature or service from start to finish with near real-time control. In addition to safely testing in production as mentioned above, teams can use LaunchDarkly to disable functionality in response to security or other concerns with the flip of a switch. Offering this fine-grained control becomes an additional selling point for continuous delivery practices.
Silent blocker #2: Risky code releases
Complex and outdated legacy software environments developed using older technology and coding practices are often not easily compatible with modern technologies. Piecing out functionality in these systems can be challenging without testing for unintended consequences such as system errors, crashes, and other unexpected behavior.
Without proper testing and release processes, there’s also a risk of introducing bugs or cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can make your mission-critical agency application vulnerable to criminal or nation-state attacks. Bugs and vulnerabilities can arise from replicating code from a legacy codebase or even when writing new code for the cloud application. The risks associated with releases can lead teams to over-correct though, causing our next silent blocker:
Silent blocker #3: Lack of confidence in releases
Well-intended risk mitigation strategies can create unnecessarily burdensome and expensive risk management processes with extended testing cycles. This blocker is usually found in environments with legacy tooling and workflows. The extra work often becomes a blocker for agencies and contracting teams who delay releases until multiple rounds of comprehensive testing in a fully-developed, expensive staging environment can occur.
Silent blocker #4: Complicated legacy testing environments
The longer it takes to test an application in a staging/testing environment, the more time and resources the agency needs to spend on testing and fixing issues. This is a common issue because staging and testing environments can be slow, cumbersome, and expensive to create, maintain, and operate. Additionally, they may not always accurately replicate the production environment, leading to delays, unexpected errors, or bugs when the application is deployed in the production environment. These blockers are highly disruptive and costly and can impact the services provided by the agency and even lead to loss of critical data.
How feature management can help
Reduce or eliminate costly pre-production testing
Pre-production testing is essential for ensuring that software is functioning correctly before it is released to the users. However, this process can be costly, time-consuming, and may not always accurately replicate the production environment.
With enterprise feature management, agency development teams can safely test features, even A/B or canary tests, in a full production environment. They can also release individual features to a specific set of people, services, devices, or other resources using precision targeting based on user attributes, custom contexts, and powerful custom rules. This approach allows developers to test or “dark launch” in production before exposing features, reducing or even eliminating the need for pre-production testing.
In the event of a feature breaking or behaving unexpectedly in production, teams can simply toggle the relevant feature flag off in 200ms, without impacting other functionality or requiring a complete roll-back to a prior release.
Experiment without risk
Innovation is a growing mandate for federal agencies and can also benefit from feature management. As your teams explore new cloud services and DevSecOps, they can use a platform like LaunchDarkly Federal to experiment without incurring extra risk on the front-end and back-end features in production. With feature flags, developers can control the release of specific features to a targeted group of users, allowing them to test new features in production with a smaller group before a wider release, creating a controlled A/B testing environment. When a winning feature variation has been identified, developers can release that variation immediately using easy-to-use templates and wizards.
By reducing the time and resources needed for experimentation, enterprise feature management enables developers to focus on creating and releasing new features more quickly and efficiently, resulting in faster product innovation and higher adoption rates.
Streamline security
In addition to separating deployments from releases, teams can use LaunchDarkly Federal to separate security reviews from feature releases. This allows teams to work in parallel and minimizes delays from security reviews. Feature management also helps agencies track feature usage and identify possible security vulnerabilities with deep visibility and detailed audit trails, allowing teams to streamline security and compliance reports. Platforms with role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), and other security features align with zero trust initiatives without interfering with agency productivity.
Overcoming agency silent blockers
Enterprise feature management is a powerful tool that can help government agencies overcome the silent blockers that hinder their IT transformation efforts. Decoupling deployment from release and combining the release motions with powerful microtargeting enables agencies to accelerate application modernization projects. As a result, program delays can be reduced, productivity can be increased, and overall performance can be improved. With enterprise feature management, government agencies can achieve their modernization goals more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
Sometimes feature flags are associated with additional technical debt and overhead from housekeeping. To address this, LaunchDarkly's feature management platform includes functionality to manage flags throughout their lifecycle. With custom workflows, developers can set up mandatory approvals per environment or schedule features to be enabled or progressively rolled out over time. Code references ensure that all flags are tracked and reviewed before they are released to production and beyond.
Automation of the feature flag lifecycle allows agency development teams to focus on more important tasks, such as creating new features. In addition, it can help teams to keep their applications up-to-date and ensure that only the most relevant and useful features are released to production. This can result in reduced technical debt, improved user satisfaction, and overall application performance.
If you are seeking more secure and reliable applications for your agency, review further insights covering how feature management can help separate deployments from releases.
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