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What are "Feature Toggles" and "Feature Branches" and what's the difference between them?
What are the pros and cons? Why is one better than the other?
I found some articles on Google regarding this, and I tend to be in the "Feature Toggles" camp, but I'm not convinced that "Feature Toggles" is the better choice in all the cases.
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You'll Waste Time Fixing Unnecessary Merge Conflicts Merge conflicts are the biggest pitfall of using feature branches. Nothing hurts more than spending unnecessary time fixing merge conflicts, especially when a feature branch has been there for a while. But time is not the only factor.
Feature branches are created from develop. When a feature is complete it is merged into the develop branch. When the release branch is done it is merged into develop and main. If an issue in main is detected a hotfix branch is created from main.
Feature toggles hinder continuous integration They delay integration, so they tend to move away from continuous integration. A risk of this is late feedback - you don't catch issues fast, because the issue is hidden behind the toggle.
A feature branch is a copy of the main codebase where an individual or team of software developers can work on a new feature until it is complete. With many engineers working in the same code-base, it's important to have a strategy for how individuals work together.
Feature toggles are methodology used in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) chain (Agile/Kanban project methodology). Basically, you send new features to production in a disabled state, then in an admin console turn the feature on (or off if you discover it's broken).
Feature branches can be part of a release methodology and integrated into a continuous integration chain. You can develop in a feature branch, deploy the branch to DEV/QA, get certification, merge the feature branch to trunk, then push the trunk to SIT/UAT/PROD environments.
There are pros and cons associated with this approach. Feature toggling requires very strict discipline as broken/dark code is making it to production. This is great for startups and shops where management knows how to pull this off and has system automation tools in place (Chef/Puppet/cfengine, etc.) Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress all deploy to production environments using feature toggling and system automation.
There are some prerequisite "techs" to do feature toggling properly: Continuous Delivery/Deployment, Continuous Integration, Automated Unit Testing, Automated Integration Testing, Automated Stress/Performance Testing, System Automation. If you don't have these in place, consider a simpler release strategy (e.g. feature branching.)
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