Feature-flagging, A/B-testing & Canary-releases explained
Feature-flagging, A/B testing & Canary-releases sometimes get mixed-up, not least because there is a lot of overlap in use and features, while they target two different user-groups: software engineers and product manager respectively. But what do they do, and when & why should you consider using them, and how? Let’s discuss it in this post.
The most basic commonality between the three concepts is that they all allow you to show new or different features to different sets of users at the same time.
Audience selection: This involves fine-grained control over who gets to see a specific feature or release. It could be targetting users based on geography (country), device- or browser-type used, internal users to your company, being logged-in or not, a repeat user, or any other characteristics of a session.
Incremental roll-outs: Incremental roll-outs allow you to define a certain percentage of users, either all users, or from a selected audience, who will be opted into a feature. You might for instance want to initially roll-out a new feature to 10% of mobile users, check some metrics or other feedback, before rolling it out to more users.
