Talia Nassi

In this talk, we'll start with why controlled rollout is important and how feature flags enable you to do it successfully, then we will talk about mobile specifics, and then a demo with React Native.

Feature flags allow development teams to separate code deployment from feature release. It has grown to be an essential tool for testing in production, A/B testing, and controlled rollout. Controlled rollout using feature flags is a way to deliver features to your users safely, but doing it on mobile comes with some challenges. How do you propagate feature flagging configuration to mobile devices that don’t always have a strong network? As a mobile developer, you want to be able to use the latest flag configuration, but you also don’t want to stop someone using the app just because you can’t load the feature flag config. 

In this talk, we'll start with why controlled rollout is important and how feature flags enable you to do it successfully, then we will talk about mobile specifics, and then a demo with React Native.

2020

React Native EU

Controlled Mobile Rollout With React Native And Feature Flags

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? And if something breaks in production, how will you know? Will you wait for a user to report it to you? What do you do when your staging test results do not reflect current production behavior? 

In order to test proactively as opposed to reactively, test in production! By testing in production, you will have increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster due to elimination of mock and bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases. You can accomplish this through feature flagging, continuous delivery, and data cleanup. Only when your end-to-end tests pass in production will you know that your features are truly working. 

I will show you how to mitigate risk, improve your understanding of the steps to get there, and shift your company’s testing culture to provide the best possible experience to your users. I will talk about the way to run tests in the production environment of a system, how to do it without disrupting real end users, and how to exclude testing data from data and analytics. 

I will also talk about the tools that help in this process, the benefits of testing in production and why the pros outweigh the cons, over doing it in staging or other testing environments, why its more reliable, and sometimes even easier.