What is a Togle?

August 17, 2024 by No Comments

A toggle is a switch that has two positions, on and off. It is often found on everyday technology devices like smartphones, cameras and laptops. It is also commonly used in software applications as a way to enable/disable features.

In a digital world, feature toggles (also called feature flags) are one of the most powerful tools we have for testing and releasing new functionality in an efficient manner. They are a fundamental building block of responsive web design and are used by the majority of major websites.

Feature toggles allow development teams to support new features as they write them in a trunk codebase without disrupting production or impacting the experience of users. They can be anything from a simple “if” statement through to complex decision trees that act upon a broad set of conditions – such as fitness test results, a setting in the feature management tool or a variable provided by a config file.

Savvy teams recognize that the inventory of toggles in their codebase comes with a carrying cost and seek to keep it as low as possible. This can be done by adding code cleanup tasks to the team’s backlog or introducing a process into their management platform for automatically pruning the toggles that have outlived their usefulness. Alternatively, some teams put “expiration dates” on their toggles that will cause them to fail a test if they are still around after the date has passed.