Atlassian is bringing new feature flagging integration into Jira Software. The company announced integration for LaunchDarkly and Rollout.
“We believe bringing additional context about flags into Jira will help improve team coordination and collaboration around product releases and generally make the practice of feature flagging more effective for both developers and the rest of the team,” the company wrote in a blog post.
LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform designed to eliminate risks. “As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value,” the team wrote on its website.
Rollout is a feature management platform for the enterprise designed to minimize risks and accelerate development with feature flags and controlled rollouts.
“This extra visibility and context helps bring peace of mind to product managers and developers. If incomplete code has been pushed to production behind a flag, stakeholders may want quick assurance that it hasn’t reached customers, without jumping between multiple applications. With the LaunchDarkly and Rollout integrations it’s easy to confirm, within Jira Software, which features have and haven’t been released to customers,” Atlassian wrote.
According to Atlassian, feature flags enables teams to test new products updates, get validation, and easily roll back without having to update code.
“Each time we release is an opportunity to learn something new. Feature flags enhance this simple build-measure-learn loop, and have become a cornerstone of the way Atlassian build products,” Atlassian wrote. “While this approach to product development isn’t new, the emergence of feature management services like LaunchDarkly and Rollout have made it easier for all software development teams to take a test-and-learn approach to development.”
Previously, teams would have to manually implement feature flags and deal with the tedious tasks of managing, tracking and removing flags. “If not managed well, this can result in technical debt that accrues over time. The consequences can be products that are harder to support and debug, or even accidental releases to customers,” Atlassian explained.