launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 2, 2011, at 9:39 AM, Deryck Hodge wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> A warning from experience: beware that our current feature flag story works pretty well for beta testing authenticated users, but not so well for anonymous users.  We should be vigilant to make sure that things work for anonymous users before turning flags on for everyone--presumably by turning flags on for everyone on local instances and then on qastaging/staging (as appropriate) and doing some exploratory testing.
>> 
> 
> Hi, Gary.
> 
> Can you be specific about what didn't work for you?  Is it that the
> feature flag system assumes an authenticated user, and so once opened
> for everyone, anonymous users saw nothing as if the content was still
> hidden behind the flag?  Or was the behavior more unpredictable for
> anonymous users and flags?  Just curious about the sort of problem to
> look for myself.

New code hidden behind a feature flag fell over for anonymous users.  In this particular case, it was security related.

Because our current feature flags are geared towards turning trial features on based on characteristics of an authenticated user, this is the kind of thing it is easy to miss.

I'm not sure if we allow all canonical LP devs to change feature flags on staging and qastaging yet.  This would be a use case for it, because we would want to have exploratory testing both with the "everyone (including anonymous users) gets the feature flag" and with the "only certain people get the feature flag" scenarios.

Alternatively or in addition, perhaps there's a clever feature flag tweak we can do, like looking for a browser cookie that we insert manually in our browsers, or something.

Gary