The Joy of Variant Assignment with Prefab Feature Flags - Building a Feature We Love

Introduction

Feature flags have become an integral part of our software development process, providing us the flexibility to release and test new features efficiently. While many feature flag tools offer similar functionalities, we had a unique vision of what would make our experience truly delightful. In this blog post, we'll share our personal journey with Prefab and how the introduction of variant assignment transformed our day-to-day feature flag management, leaving us happier with our own product.

What is Variant Assignment

Variant assignment is a task we encounter frequently - as developers, product managers, or sales representatives. Setting up a feature flag is great, but we almost always want to test them out. Variant assignment is when we specify that person X should be in a particular bucket. When I develop with a flag I'll usually assign myself to one variant and then then flip-flop a few times to verify functionality. Once it's released I'll usually do the same for internal and external users, so they can check out the new feature. Unfortunately this seemingly simple task can become tedious when dealing with tracking IDs and user data.

The Struggle with User Identification

The best practice for identifying a user is something that looks like:

prefab_context = {
  user: {
    key: "7971f1c7-30ba-456f-be00-ab798f03d3b8", // GUID assigned to cookie before user is created
    id: 4233, // User ID in our database
    name: "Jane Doe",
  },
};

This let's us keep a consistent view of someone from visitor to user, respects PII by not using email and gives us a useful handle to the person by using their name.

But there's a problem.

When we want to put a user into a feature bucket we typically know their name, but not their tracking GUID. Using Prefab for ourselves, we found remembering or locating their unique tracking IDs often disrupted our workflow. The constant back-and-forth between tools to find user information became a pain point we wanted to address.

Prefab's Empowering Solution: Our Own Creation

As creators of Prefab, we had the freedom to build the feature we craved - a seamless variant assignment process. What that should look like was pretty clear. I'd like to be able to search for a user by name, and then click to assign them to a variant.

There's a reason that most open-source and home-grown solutions don't have this feature though. A typical feature flag back end doesn't have any knowledge of the user context. Simple feature flag systems just store the flag rules and ship them out to the client SDKS. In order to build this feature, we need the client SDKs to start phoning home with the contexts that they've seen.

Building the Feature

Building the clients correctly was a good challenge. We wanted to make sure that we didn't add any unnecessary overhead to the client SDKs. To do that, the clients are built to only send new contexts that they haven't uploaded and to behave appropriately under heavy load.

By capturing the context server side, we were able to create profile pages for each user. This change allowed us to search for users effortlessly, using their names or any other information from the context. No more obscure tracking GUIDs - just straightforward assignment from the user's profile page.

Staying in the Flow with Prefab

The addition of variant assignment in Prefab was a transformative moment for us. The ability to swiftly assign variants without any context switching or hunting for IDs made a remarkable difference in our day-to-day experience. We found ourselves in a delightful flow, focused on core development work, testing, and refining features.

As you evaluate Feature Flag tools or consider building your own, I'd encourage you to strongly consider adding this capability to your decision process. You can live without it, but you deserve nice things. Luckily with Prefab there's no reason not to give yourself a present.