Fighting Fires with Feature Flags
Introduction It was Friday afternoon on the last sprint of the quarter. After months of stakeholder meetings, demos, experimentation, and testing, we deployed at 4:00 PM. By 4:05, we wished we hadn’t. An unhandled edge case in a last-minute revision sparked an hours-long production fire that affected promotional payment processing, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales from frustrated customers.