Feature management is a modern software-development practice that decouples feature release from code deployment and enables quick changes to feature availability on demand. It uses a technique called feature flags (also known as feature toggles and feature switches) to dynamically administer a feature's lifecycle.

Feature management helps developers address the following problems: How to handle code branching when your team have to do fixes and new functionality simultaneously? How to test multiple isolated changes within actual customer data? How do rollback changes with minimal downtime and effort? How can some users try new features on production without breaking others?

Tharanga Chandrasekara, Lead Technical Consultant at Theta (NZ) and Business Central MVP for the past seven years, together with Volodymyr Leonov, Technical Lead at Theta (NZ), will take the audience through a short overview of the "trunk-based" and feature flag approach.

Then the presenters will present how Microsoft uses Business Central Feature Management functionality to handle and control braking changes for 100K+ SaaS customers.

Presenters will demonstrate how a standard delivery pipeline changes when you spice it with feature management, diving deep into coding practices and toolsets. Toolset includes an open-source extension that partners can start using right away.

Attendees can take home a few great ideas on delivering sound solutions faster and illuminating waits within a complete delivery cycle.

Points
Theory: trunk-based development (T) - 10 mins
Theory: feature flag (with better slides) (V) - 10 mins
Show code: how Microsoft handles feature management. Show objects, data upgrade, enable/disable coding (T) - 30 mins
Show code: How you could handle this using open-source tools (V) - 20 mins