Flagering

Flagering is a technique used in certain fields, particularly in software development and testing, to control the availability or behavior of specific features. It involves wrapping a piece of code or functionality in a conditional statement that can be toggled on or off. This toggle is often managed externally, allowing developers or administrators to change the state of the feature without deploying new code.

The primary purpose of flagering is to enable gradual rollouts of new features, allowing a small percentage of users to test the functionality before it's made available to everyone. This can help identify and mitigate bugs or performance issues early on. It also facilitates A/B testing, where different versions of a feature can be presented to different user groups to determine which performs better. Furthermore, flagering provides a "kill switch" mechanism. If a newly released feature causes unexpected problems, it can be quickly disabled by flipping the corresponding flag, minimizing disruption. This approach is also valuable for managing complex release cycles and for enabling dark launches, where features are deployed to production but remain hidden from users until ready.