Glossary

What are feature flags? A feature flag (or feature toggle) is a piece of conditional code which allows a software development team to separate code deployment from feature release. They’re used for A/B testing on both the front- and back-end, for canary deployment, and to make continuous integration and continuous…

We have been well familiar with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) for some time now.   SDLC is a broad framework for defining development methodologies. It’s an overarching definition to include any project management framework that follows a standard set of procedures for developing software. Often when we hear…

As a software development team increases in size and the functionality becomes increasingly complex, it becomes more important to frequently verify the integrity of the product build. Many development and QA professionals have come to realize that some degree of automation is the only feasible approach to effectively manage frequent…

What comes to your mind when you think of feature flags? If you’ve heard of them, you probably think of them in the context of turning on and off new features. But feature flags have back-end use cases too – including but not limited to reducing risk in database migrations.…

The Case for Microservices Monoliths – the type of application where all its code is in one single codebase – are extremely common. Just about every application begins as a monolith, in some way or another. However, there is a major problem with monoliths: they make users depend on code…

False positive rate (FPR) is a measure of accuracy for a test: be it a medical diagnostic test, a machine learning model, or something else. In technical terms, the false positive rate is defined as the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis. False Positive Definition Imagine you have an…

Testing in production is the process of continuing to test new features after code has already been deployed to the production environment. It does not mean releasing untested code to users and hoping it works, and it’s best implemented in addition to pre-production testing processes. Deployment vs Release In order…

“We do software development, we should build our own solution” and “if someone has already built it, why reinvent the wheel” are two common, conflicting solutions to many software problems. We call this the “build vs buy” question. The idea of feature flags as a service is moving feature flags…

Client-side testing refers to any type of testing – commonly A/B testing, but also multivariate testing or multi-armed-bandit testing – that occurs in the user’s browser. This is contrasted with server-side testing, where the test cases are decided on the back-end (in the web server) before they’re served to the…

Server-side testing refers to any type of testing – commonly A/B testing, but also multivariate testing or multi-armed bandit testing – that occurs on the web server instead of in the user’s browser. This is contrasted with client-side testing, where the test cases are rendered (typically using some type of…