De-Risking Software Releases With Progressive Delivery

A recent IDC report highlights how progressive delivery can help engineering organizations safely deliver their code to end users. Progressive delivery involves incrementally exposing new features to internal and external users, allowing for iterations on features and bug detection before affecting a significant portion of the user base. Feature flags enable developers to gradually release features to different user segments, gather feedback, monitor feature impact on specific user groups, and ensure a personalized and optimized experience. Strategies such as percentage rollouts, canary releases, internal testing, entitlement releases, and blue-green deployments are part of a broader progressive release strategy that can be enacted through feature flags and targeting in LaunchDarkly. The report also outlines benefits from de-risking software releases with feature flags and progressive delivery, including more frequent application releases, improved production reliability, enhanced operational resilience, improved confidence across development and operations teams, and better developer and site reliability engineer experience.