What are the best practices for using feature flag integration (e.g LaunchDarkly) with Jira?

Question

I'm trying to understand how others are using feature flag integration with Jira today.

1. Is it common for only epic issues types to be linked to feature flag? Do you avoid multiple epics being linked to same feature flag?

2. When it's time for a release to be cut, how do you determine which feature flags are ready to be turned on? Do you leverage any type of dashboard to monitor progress against feature flag?

Looking for any tips or suggested best practices :)

Miren Rathod · Answer

Hi Carlos,

Thanks for the warm welcome and sharing those links!  They were helpful but I'm more interested in understanding from a process flow. Let me share an example to help illustrate.

Example

Let's say I'm planning to release a feature with work that spans across many teams who will check-in their incremental code changes into the main branch over multiple releases, hidden behind a feature flag. The feature flag should be turned on for customers after all work has completed.

For simplicity let's say two teams: Team X and Team Y.  And each team has their own EPIC and Stories to track their respective work.

Issue breakdown

* Epic X (fixVersion = release 2) * Story X1 (fixVersion = release 1)
* Story X2 (fixVersion = release 2)

* Epic Y (fixVersion = release 3)* Story Y1 (fixVersion = release 2)
* Story Y2  (fixVersion = release 3)

Where fixVersion for each story identifies which release code was checked-in. And fixVersion for each EPIC identifies release all stories under EPIC are completed by.

Questions

* Would you link feature flag to all epics and all stories? Or just epics, or just stories?
* How do you identify in example above that 'release 3' is when the feature flag is ready to be turned on? E.g latest fix version across epics
* Any best practices on identifying the release code was checked-in vs feature being made available to customers? 
* Any general tips/best practices for linking feature flags and managing the rollout of feature to customers?

Carlos Garcia Navarro · Answer

Hi @Miren Rathod ,

Welcome to the Community! Sorry if you already know this, but just in case, have you checked these articles about how to integrate LaunchDarkly and Jira?:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/integrate-with-feature-flags/

https://www.atlassian.com/devops/feature-flagging-tutorials/jira-launchdarkly-feature-flagging

You can have multiple issues linked to a flag.