[LRUG] Deployment approach to rolling out huge changes

[Tom Armitage]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Ed James (Alt) <ed.james.spam at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Beta environment allows us to see application changes in a production
> environment using live data. It means we don't always have to put new beta
> features behind things like beta flags or introduce conditions into the
> code. This is quite common practice as far as I know (Facebook do something
> similar).

So: it sounds like staging is working for you pretty sensibly,
especially with the data-snapshots being pushed into it. But it's this
Beta environment that's causing the problems.

I was wondering if you have any specific aversion to feature flagging?
It feels like a much better solution here, given that Beta/Prod are
treading on each others' toes a lot, and feature flags feel like a
good fit here. I'd also note there are ways of implementing their
integration that are less heavy on conditionals (if it's the idea of a
ton of conditionals invading your code that's the thing you dislike).
It also means you can slowly roll out beta features to some (but not
all) users, if you'd like to test features in the wild.

It wasn't clear from the above statement precisely why you weren't so
keen on them, so thought I'd draw it out.