DEV Community: Ibrahem Abukhalil

Managing Feature Flags Directly From Your Jira Account

Ibrahem Abukhalil — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 11:11:39 +0000

Using specialized tools is beneficial. However, we often keep flicking between screens, making it easy to lose focus on what matters. But, if your tools integrate, that problem becomes obsolete.

I'm taking you around to learn how ConfigCat and Jira can work together to streamline your development process.

What is Jira?

Jira is a tool that can help teams of all types to manage and track their work. It started as a bug and issue tracker, and now it has evolved into a popular management tool that can serve different types of teams.

Using it simplifies the process of planning and tracking tasks, such as bugs to fix, features to implement, or tasks to complete. Hence, it is convenient for companies that follow agile methodologies, but it's also easily customizable and can be tailored to fit any workflow you need.

Advantages of using Jira

I’d say avoiding the chaos is the highlight of Jira. All of its main features aim to reduce the mess during development, like being able to ticket issues, create user stories, and to plan sprints.

In the same vein, you can create tasks, assign them to your team members and track their progress, bringing more transparency to the development process.

Their kanban board also saves time and money by eliminating the need to meet one hour a week for updates. Suppose your team consists of five members, which would result in extra twenty hours of development time every month.

Additionally, Jira stands out for its wide variety of integrations. It comes with a robust API that makes it easy to integrate with other tools or systems.

Advantages of Using Jira with Feature Flags.

By linking Jira with feature flags, engineers and product managers will always be up-to-date and aware of what's happening, reducing their concerns of losing control. That’s particularly useful when a large group is involved or if they are geographically separated.

It helps them know how things are going, like which features are in development, what features are out, in what percentage, and for whom.

But here’s the kicker, when you combine the development tracking tool with a feature flagging tool that can fastly roll back your features, you'll experience more confidence and peace of mind in your development process. Like if a fire breaks out, you'll have the extinguisher right in your hands.

The integration between ConfigCat and Jira

ConfigCat's integration with Jira lets you manage your feature flags directly inside Jira, so you no longer need to switch between tools to handle your flags.

The process is straightforward, just a one-time configuration so ConfigCat can talk with Jira.

From your ConfigCat account

You need to generate an API credential, which takes a few mouse clicks by following the instructions below.

In the ConfigCat dashboard, press the arrow to open the side menu
Find My API Credentials
Press on ADD CREDENTIALS
Name your credential and press generate.
You will be able to see a generated username and password. Keep it open, so you can copy-paste it later.

ConfigCat does not save the generated passwords as a security precaution, but you can always generate a new one.

From your Jira account

Download ConfigCat’s plugin from the marketplace, once you finish downloading the plugin. Press on configure and enter your confidential details.

There you go, ConfigCat's integration is now live in your Jira.

As of now, you will be able to connect your issues to an existing feature flag or even create a new one with different rules that let you roll back, segment, and target your audience with the percentage you want directly from your Jira issue.

For example, say we are working on a UI bug, and you want a button to hide/show the background image without constantly going back to the code.

On the right side of your issue, you'll see the option "Link/Create ConfigCat Feature Flag", which allows you to choose whether to create a new feature flag or link it to an existing one. In my case, I will create a new one.

When you create the flag, it will appear as part of your issue, and at this point, you can start managing your feature flag without having to return to ConfigCat's dashboard.

Taking a look at the image above, it tells you it is linked to one feature flag and shows you the status of that flag. Click on the status will pop up a window showing you all your feature flags and their status.

On the other hand, ConfigCat's dashboard will show the linked feature flag with a label saying it's connected to a Jira ticket.

How to control ConfigCat Feature Flags Inside Jira?

You will see this flag in your Jira issue by default, and from now on, you can control it in the following ways:

Switching the toggle on/off, enables you to quickly activate or deactivate any part of your code remotely, such as a function or UI element.
Target specific users, where you can target your users depending on custom attributes, like email, age, or any other identifier that you set.
Target segment, which allows for grouping users based on common factors, could be a location, subscription type, or device type.
Target % of users, this gives you the ability to do a canary release or roll out a feature to a specific percentage of your users, which is ideal when testing new features.

So to play with our feature, say we need this feature to be enabled only for certain people. For example, I want only 70% of my employees to see this feature.

The first rule is to target specific users, followed by a percentage of users. Leading us to this final look for the flag in your Jira issue.

Conclusion

With Jira, you can keep the ball rolling with your team as it streamlines the development process and increases transparency. Integrating ConfigCat gives you the ability to fully control your features within your Jira account, eliminating the need to switch screens.

There is additional content on ConfigCat’s blog that is worth exploring. You can also find ConfigCat on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

What is A/B testing and how do Feature Flags contribute to it?

Ibrahem Abukhalil — Thu, 05 May 2022 19:39:53 +0000

Most companies believe they understand the customer, only to be shocked when their customers behave differently than what they expected, either intentionally or unintentionally. That's where A/B testing comes in to kick all these doubts and prevent the shock.

We’ll play around to see how A/B testing works with ConfigCat’s feature flag management service to take your experiments to the next level by giving you the ability to remotely control and configure your features without going back to the code.

So, What is A/B Testing?

A/B Testing is a statistical technique used to analyze differences between two or more versions, for instance version A and version B (both "A" and "B" are given one-half of users).

Illustrative Example

Half of your users will see the poster in aqua, while the other half will see it in red. At the end of the test, you’ll be able to determine which color the users preferred. Awesome, right? That’s how businesses work these days; adopting a data-driven approach has shown incredible results.

Google, Twitter, Netflix, and many other companies run thousands of A/B tests. One of the most popular A/B Testing stories was when a Google team couldn't decide between two blue shades on their links’ color, so they tried 41 shades of blue, which eventually ended up making them an extra $200 million in revenue per year.

The nice thing about A/B testing is that your visitors will have no idea that they’re part of a test, which is important because this provides unbiased results that help you determine what works best.

In terms of a real-world scenario, say you have a content page and want to add an image with the intent to improve your visitors' experience.

Once you run a test, you will determine which had the better matrices, and the winning version will become your new default page.

You can also test out different variations if you are uncertain about a few changes, or you think you can still improve.

So here we go, testing three versions, moving people from one experience to another. Some are good and some are bad. As a result of A/B testing, you remove the guessing game and your questions get answered with data.

A/B Testing and Feature Flags

A/B Testing was traditionally known for making cosmetic changes to your website, like changing a layout, button, or even font size. But by using feature flags (also known as feature toggles), you can more easily test functional changes. Nowadays, A/B testing goes hand in hand with feature flags.

ConfigCat provides feature flag management and as a benefit of the service, you will have complete control over your features and versions, rolling out a particular version to a growing segment of your audience, and even the ability to scale it back.

Additionally, you can use feature flags to parameterize your code to test different configurations.

Why should you do A/B Testing?

If you ever wondered what to do to increase the conversion rate for your website, then A/B testing is the answer. This will enable you to better understand your product and audience by answering most of your business questions.

Everything will be presented to you as data; you will rely on statistics and data instead of intuition. These metrics will help you analyze and quantify the changes you make to your product. There are no guesses, no opinions, just data that help you make informed decisions.

Also, it's worth noting that tests can help reduce risks.

However, even if your test results were disappointing, any outcome can be viewed as a learning curve that can be used to understand your audience better, which will help you with the upcoming changes.

Where and What to A/B Test?

Testing can be done almost anywhere on your site. On your home page, content page, signup form, or your ads.

And there are a lot of use cases as well. You can test the pages on your site, both visually and functionally. It's also beneficial to test the pricing when selling products. Aside from that, you can test your business model, for example, by offering a 14-day trial instead of a 7-day trial.

How To Get Started?

Step 1: Know your weaknesses

Your first step is to know your weaknesses by analyzing your website. You can use analytics tools (Amplitude, Mixpanel, or similar) to see where your website pages are underperforming.

Ex: having inappropriate scrolling depths or low conversion rates. Also, you can use click heatmaps to analyze how the visitors interact with your site.

Step 2: Create a hypothesis

The second stage is to create your hypothesis; once you know what is going wrong in your site, you must clarify how and what you need to change to make it better.

Set your goals and define what success means to you in this case; this will help you understand the purpose of the experiment.

Note: Trying out random ideas can be pretty costly. You might waste valuable time and traffic. This is not recommended.

Step 3: Code a variation

Now it’s time to create a variation based on what you’d like to improve. When setting the variations, always ask yourself what you can learn if this variation wins or loses, so no matter if your final results were positive or negative, you'll end up learning about your site through the experiment. Afterward, you will need to code the variation under a ConfigCat feature flag, so you can fully control it.

To set up your variation, you'll need to sign up for a free account on ConfigCat and then simply follow the instructions below.

Step 4: Run the test

This is the step where you run your test using your favorite analytics tool. Make sure that the measurements are in place, so your test results will be clear and easy to interpret.

Things to watch out for:

Minimum sample size. To ensure that your test results can be trusted, you should determine how many visitors you need.

For example, suppose 6% of your visitors do what you wanted them to do, like purchasing something or submitting a form. And you wanted to increase your 6% conversion rate by 30%. If you plug these numbers into the calculator, it will tell you that you need 2840 visitors for each variant.

You can also enter the number of daily visitors using the calculator to determine the best duration for the test. For example, if your website averages 800 daily visitors, and you have two variations, the test should last for 75 days to get effective results. In the meantime, you can shorten it as much as you like or terminate it if you detect something.

External factors. When planning for an upcoming test, you should consider external factors such as the season, holidays, weather, and other situations. Testing your sale ads on Black Friday, for example, wouldn't be a good idea.
Consider the type of device. When you run the test on all the traffic flowing through your multi-platform software, such as desktop and mobile. Then make sure to check how the test looks on each platform separately.

Once you have considered these factors, it is time to launch your test.

Step 5: Analyze the results

In our final phase, we will monitor the performance, analyze the results, and evaluate how each variation performed compared to the other. That doesn’t happen inside your ConfigCat manager; you usually need an analytics dashboard that not only shows numbers but also explains where they are coming from.

DataDog can be used for this. There's an integration with ConfigCat that makes it easy to use. Just create a DataDog account and insert your DataDog API key into the ConfigCat Integration page's DataDog field, and voila, all the events with your flag will be sent to your analytic tool.

Let's say, however, if your actual conversion rate is 3% and after testing your changes, you got a result of a 4% conversion rate. You have increased the conversion rate a little. Now it’s your decision if you would like to apply these changes to your site or to try another hypothesis.

You may also want to consider targeting your variations to a specific kind of audience. For example, to your most valuable customers or to find out what visitors from the United States or Europe think about these changes. ConfigCat solves that issue.

Additionally, another factor to consider is the statistical significance. In short, It gives you an idea of whether your results are caused by what you have done or by randomness. The ideal and practical significance level (also called confidence) is usually 95%, and the remaining 5% represents the probability of errors, known as the P-value. In other words, if you repeated the test 100 times, you would see the same result 95 times out of 100.

Step 6: Document the outcomes

Last but not least, don’t forget to document your results and highlight the positives and negatives. After all, we are learning and testing. These documents will become the basis for holding quick and productive brainstorming sessions with your team.

Once you've completed all the steps, repeat it. Repetition is the key for A/B testing. The more you do it, the better you get; it's not magic.

Who should use A/B Testing?

Designers. The most popular use of A/B Testing is to test out new design ideas because even a small change in text size or color can alter the entire user experience.
Product Managers. As decision-makers, you must know how the decisions you make impact your customers, especially crucial decisions; otherwise, you won't see the effectiveness of your changes quickly.
Marketers. They use A/B testing to test images, videos, or product descriptions to decide what, where, and how to advertise.
Data Analyst. Even if the test itself is straightforward, the data you obtain might not be. The data analysts can dig deep and use this information to understand a more holistic approach for serving customers and to answer every “why?”.

Conclusion

A/B Testing is invaluable to any digital decision-maker in an online environment and crucial for improving conversion rates.

Make sure you check out the ConfigCat Blog for a wide variety of content. You can also find ConfigCat on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A battle between two promising feature flag companies, ConfigCat and Flagsmith

Ibrahem Abukhalil — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 17:18:46 +0000

The tech world has some really interesting competitions in its fold. There is nothing that motivates a company more than having competitors in the same field. Everyone tries to win, and everyone wants to be better than everyone else. We as consumers are always greatly benefited by this.

I'm bringing together two Feature Flags companies that have worked hard for the last few years to deliver the best quality service that they can to their customers. We're talking about ConfigCat and Flagsmith, which was also previously known as Bullet Train.

As they are both great in their own way, I'm comparing them to make your decision easier if you're choosing one of them.

But what is a Feature Flag?

Feature flags are a way for software developers to enable or disable functionality remotely, without deploying code. This means that a new feature can be deployed without it being visible to the users. Deployment and releases can be decoupled with feature flags, so you can manage a feature's entire lifecycle. The feature flags may be booleans, strings, or integers, depending on what you need and what the company offers.

We will begin to compare the two companies and don't worry if you're not familiar with feature flags, because we'll talk about the services offered by both companies so you'll get a clearer picture of how feature flags work and how they can support your development lifecycle.

As I said, both are great but the main difference between them is that ConfigCat is proprietary software with open source SDKs and Flagsmith is 100% open source.

As a programmer, I love to use open-source software because of its flexibility, speed, and cost. It's like having your own product and serving yourself by yourself. But that doesn't mean that I should always use open-source just because I love it.

Isn't open-source software better than proprietary software?

It's awesome to have open-source software like Flagsmith, especially that most of their platform is under the BSD-3-Clause License and a small number of repositories are under the MIT license.

But it's not always best to implement open-source software due to long-term costs, and I'm not talking about money only, but the time and effort that it will take to maintain. You have to handle deployment, scaling, maintenance, or upgrading all by yourself. Many start-up companies do this due to the budget and later regret it, mostly when their businesses grow. One main big issue is quality control, and the open-source ethos just can't understand this in business.

While in ConfigCat the service is out there for you. With zero updates, bugs, or security issues to deal with or to worry about, you can just chill. Everything will be ready to use, and you just have to pay them with money, and they also offer a free plan that we will look into, so don't rush.

In any case, I believe that the most important part of picking proprietary software is selecting the right company that offers a complete product stack and can continue to support/develop it going forward. And finally, for the consumer to be comfortable with it. In the meantime, ConfigCat allows you to directly communicate with the developers. Flagsmith however also offers a hosted service as well.

Talk features to me

Both offer almost the same features, but different features are included in different plans, so let's dig into this.

Service SLA

There is an Up-Time service level agreement for ConfigCat, and as I mentioned, you can contact their developers directly.

Flagsmith does not provide a service level agreement until you purchase their enterprise plan, which is their most expensive plan, but they do offer a community forum. Although I'm not sure if it's good or not, I personally don't have much reliance on such a thing.

Supported SDK's

Neither company is weak in this area, as both companies support the most popular programming languages with detailed documentation.

Generally, they both support mobile, desktop, microservices, server-side scripts, web frontends, and APIs.

Check out ConfigCat SDK's documentation and Flagsmith SDK's documentation if you're interested.

Security and Access

Some people consider open-source software more secure than proprietary software, for some reason, but this depends on how you handle it. There are some features in Flagsmith that aren't open-source, as well as some security features, like user roles, permissions, 2FA, SAML authentication, and audit logs. They're given in their scale-up plan, their most popular plan, which costs $200 monthly. Meanwhile, ConfigCat has a clear security focus by including 2FA, SAML SSO, auto-assign users, and audit log retention for all of their plans, even the free one.

What about the data?

ConfigCat evaluates the feature flags on the client-side, which means that your data will never leave your system. They only store feature flag values and the targeting rules you set. Furthermore, they have multiple CDN servers globally, which allows content to be delivered fast and efficiently to people based on their geographical location.

Meanwhile, Flagsmith evaluates feature flags on the server-side. And it's an open-source program that can be run in the cloud or deployed on-premises, putting reliability and data security in your control. Due to the open nature of open-source software, it offers a higher chance of finding and fixing security vulnerabilities. However, generalizing that "all open source software is more secure" would be incorrect.

Integrations

Below you can see the integration tools for each company; IMHO ConfigCat takes the lead here in terms of overall management, putting development tools at the forefront, whereas Flagsmith focuses more on analytical and testing tools.

Give me more features

Both are user-friendly, even non-technical users will find them easy to use.
Both support percentage based rollouts, which allow you to choose the exact percentage of users it reaches, whether it is 10%, 30%, or 80%
User targeting, allows you to target specific groups of users, such as those who have specific email formats. Yes, that's true.
Environments, offers the ability to manage your feature flags at every step of the development lifecycle - from local development through production deployment. A project's environments are usually production, QA, staging, or individual.
Rollbacks, Taking back the features that you rolled out.
A/B Testing, you test two variants of the same product to determine which version of a product or feature delivers better results. It requires setting up a targeting rule for a percentage of users and then using an analytics tool to track the things that are important to you. A/B and MVT Testing are included in all Flagsmith plans whereas Configcat requires a separate product.

Pricing

Both companies have their own plans.

ConfigCat doesn't care how big your team is or the number of users that you have, they charge by the number of config.json downloads. If you can estimate how many HTTP requests you may receive, then take a look at their plan calculator.

Their free trial is very convenient. They give you 10 feature flags to use forever and an unlimited number of teammates for free, plus the ability to create a permission group with different permissions. Their keen focus on security and access is also a plus. ConfigCat is an excellent choice, especially if you have a large team or an intention to increase the number of your team members.

Flagsmith, on the other hand, cares about the number of API requests per month, the number of members, and the number of projects. However, they give you as many feature flags as you want.

You can use their free trial for 50K requests per month, coupled with 1 person working on a single project, with an unlimited number of feature flags, including A/B and MVT tests, which is awesome.

Conclusion

Using feature flags is not something that you need to overthink about, you should just start using them. They'll boost productivity and ease deployment stress. There is no solitary opinion here, this is everyone's opinion who uses feature flags. As a starting point, I advise you to try out one of the free plans, as my company did. And guess what? All our needs were met by one of the free plans, so I highly recommend giving it a shot since it has no risk and it offers substantial benefits. And always remember that feature flags are really awesome.