What to ask your agency about feature flags

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on feature flags, these questions are worth asking early.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Flags let you ship code before you ship the feature. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Delete flags once they are permanently on. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about feature flags before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Delete flags once they are permanently on — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.