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Feature Flags vs. Configuration Options – Same Difference?
Associate Professor · Carnegie Mellon University · Institute for Software Research Update: We have published a paper on this discussion, including updates from interviews we conducted, at ICSE-SEIP 2020. Having spent over a decade researching configurable systems and software product lines, the phenomenon of feature flags is interesting but also deeply familiar.
The product line community has developed notations and tools for modeling and reasoning about variability at scale (thousands of options) and has discussed implementation, testing, and analysis strategies for systems with planned configurations. Also the extra statements may introduce unusual or complex control flows (e.g., exceptions) that are not easily recognized (our own study has shown that developers often make such mistakes when asked to identify all code belonging to an option (Lillack, Kästner, and Bodden 2018)). In our interviews, we saw that documentation and description of dependencies is likely the place where feature flag practitioners most lack behind the product line community and use often at most ad-hoc mechanisms and sparse comments spread across various configuration or source files.
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