Moving Away from the Monolith — Features & flags

Feature branches are wasteful and slow. How do feature flags actually fix the problem?

I really liked Ben Brazier’s piece on The Problem with Feature Branches. He’s spot on. But as I was flipping through a few comments, it struck me how much confusion there is about how to achieve continuous releases.

Before going any further, let’s define “continuous release.” What I’m chiefly concerned about is the continuous, unimpeded pipeline from development to production — I don’t necessarily mean “you must release new software every day.” Different businesses have different cadences, different schedules, and different time-to-market drivers. From my perspective, “continuous” in this context could be daily, weekly, or whatever meets the business need. The most important thing is that once a developer is done coding, the work moves unimpeded to a product-ready state and can go into production any time thereafter.

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