The colloquial “merge hell” experienced by developers attempting to merge long-lived feature branches into trunk is eliminated with feature flags. Features can now be developed directly in trunk and flagged to be disabled off so that they receive all updates to the code, but are not yet enabled before they’re ready to go. Gone are the days of developers rushing to be the first one done with their feature branch so they do not have to deal with the merge headaches.

Traditional software release practices require software and business teams to work lock-step with each other in order to align business and technical requirements before a release. The problem is, these teams are rarely working in perfect sync due to different priorities and timelines. Feature flags allow features to be deployed to production when the development team is ready, and revealed to customers when the business team is ready, removing the need for lock-step work and allowing each team to work at their own pace. This gets developers back to doing what they do best - creating the next big feature!

Feature flags provide a safe method for shifting a level of testing to production, from infrastructure testing to user acceptance testing (UAT). Even the best pre-production test environment cannot perfectly mirror the dynamics of production, and pushing code straight to production in a safe, partitioned way that does not impact the rest of users allows QA teams to get a realistic view of how a feature will perform in production without worrying about creating every possible scenario in a pre-production test environment.