Unleash 5.7: Managing Large Releases, Measuring Lead Time for Changes, Improved Troubleshooting and More

Unleash 5.7 was released last week, and we have new tools and iterative improvements to share with you.

To help teams release several features simultaneously, Unleash 5.7 introduces Dependent Feature flags, which allow you to define a child flag that depends on a parent flag.

We’re excited to debut our DORA metrics dashboard, starting by measuring Lead Time for Changes; we know that Unleash improves engineering performance and expect to help quantify some of that impact with this new metrics dashboard.

Unleash 5.7 also improves the Playground, our tool that shows which of your instance’s feature toggles would be enabled for a given Unleash context. We also enhanced the Last Seen functionality to provide more insights into how your flags are working.

Finally, we’ve also added Banners to help you communicate with all users of your Unleash Admin UI.

Managing Large Releases with Dependent Flags

Version: Pro + Unleash Enterprise

With Unleash 5.7, creating child flags that depend on a parent flag is now possible. For the flag to be enabled, both the parent and child conditions must be met.

This functionality will help teams who need to manage releases of several features at once. This is especially helpful if you also need to help coordinate across teams, countries, or departments. We expect another everyday use case will be a Kill Switch that toggles many pieces simultaneously.

Because dependent flags introduce new logic, using them will require SDK updates; check the documentation for more information. Currently, parent and child must be in the same project, only one parent is allowed per child, and there is only one level of parent > child dependencies (no grandparents).

Measuring Lead Time for Changes from DORA Metrics

Version: Unleash Enterprise

Unleash 5.7 introduces a new DORA metrics dashboard to help quantify organizational performance for our Enterprise customers. DORA Metrics can help measure DevOps efficiency and communicate performance to business stakeholders. This is a new feature, and we’re actively gathering feedback to help us improve functionality and utility. Currently, the dashboard calculates one of the DORA metrics: “Lead Time for Changes” per feature, which tracks the time it takes a commit to get into production.

Give it a look, and let us know what you think!

Playground Improvements

Version: Open Source + Pro + Unleash Enterprise

The Playground was first introduced in version 4.14 to help you see which of your instance’s feature flags would be enabled for a given Unleash context. It has multiple uses, such as:

• Understanding how Unleash evaluates strategies, constraints, and segments.
• Debugging Unleash contexts and flags behaving differently from what you expect.
• Tailoring a set of strategies for given contexts.

In Unleash 5.7, we’ve made several additional improvements, and the Playground now displays disabled strategies to see what is happening more fully.

To simplify debugging, a new option is available to provide a token for the evaluation process. This token will grant the evaluation the same level of access that the token has to run against.

Consistency and Understandability with Flag Naming Patterns

Version: Unleash Enterprise

Many Enterprise customers have asked us for ways to set flag naming patterns, and Unleash 5.7 delivers just that. On a per-project basis, you can now enforce naming conventions with a JavaScript RegEx pattern and help text and examples to help users understand the pattern.

Communication Banners

Version: Unleash Enterprise

Finally, we’re pleased to share new Banners that can help you communicate with users of the Admin UI. This feature enables Enterprise customers to display interactive banners on their Unleash instance for all users.

There are four different types of banners, each with their own styling and intent:

• Information

• Warning

• Error

• Success

They can also include icons, links, and dialogues for rich functionality.

Last Seen by Environment

Version: Open Source + Pro + Unleash Enterprise

The ‘Last Seen’ function now provides more insight into how your flags work by showing the environment in which they were seen. This will identify flags that require clean-up in a specific environment.