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by jbardnz 3799 days ago
I really like the idea of feature toggles but i'm scared of quickly having a lot of technical debt because of them.

I was looking at using something like https://launchdarkly.com but the pricing is very expensive even at fairly small scale.

3 comments

If you have a RBAC setup it's pretty easy to setup feature testing. It's the second most awesome reason why I setup RBACs on any and all projects.
We use feature toggled a fair amount on our SAAS application. It does create technical debt which at some point has to be addressed.

One thing that confuses our junior developers is the difference between a feature toggles and a client permission. Often they misuse a feature toggle as a client permission, simply because only one client is using that feature (currently).

How do you typically address or mitigate your technical debt?
Currently we are forced to ignore it until it becomes a performance problem or a new feature touches the same code. This is simply because new features are paid for by clients and they take priority over technical debt.

We only tend to refactor code (as a rule) when you are already working inside that code section on something new (feature, improvement or bug).

Otherwise junior developers have a tendency to want to refactor all the things!

If you wrote a new unit test, or altered an existing one to accommodate new code, then knock yourself out and refactor away and knock yourself out!

Co-founder of LaunchDarkly here-- we're dropping our startup package to $9 / month in the next week. Come check us out.