LaunchDarkly Releases Second Annual State of Feature Management Report

Study reveals strength for feature management category as demand for investment grows


OAKLAND, Calif., Nov. 10, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform, today announced the release of its second annual State of Feature Management Report. Developed in partnership with Wakefield Research, the report gathered insights from 1,000 IT and software professionals. The report examines not only how software professionals implement feature management in their day-to-day practices, but also their input into issues such as how critical feature management is for their jobs, their opinion pertaining to their feature management budget and how much of that budget they are likely to receive in the coming year.

Some of the most notable findings from the report include:

  • Software and IT professionals are demanding increases in their company’s feature management investment; and business leaders are listening:
    • 74% said that their company’s budget for feature management needs to be $100,000 or above for the upcoming year.
    • 80% of senior executives believe their company’s feature management investment should increase by at least $100,000.
    • 79% expect their feature management budget to increase over the next 12 months.
    • 45% expect to get the full budget request they need, while 41% expect to get slightly less than that.
  • Feature management is a must-have technology:
    • 69% noted that feature management software is a must-have, mission critical and/or high priority.
    • 98% of software & IT pros agree that feature management saves their company money and delivers a strong ROI.
    • 77% of teams who make feature management a priority are categorized as highly productive and top performers, releasing code several times a week at least.
  • Tech teams are finding new ways to use feature flags:
    • More than half (55%) of software and IT pros use feature flags for long-term operational controls, using permanent flags to change backend configurations on the fly, indicating that feature flags are essential infrastructure for development.
    • Almost half (47%) of software and IT pros use feature flags for entitlements and plan management, i.e. granting or denying access to feature sets or entire versions of their application depending on an end user’s subscription or plan.

“The findings of our latest State of Feature Management survey further validate the presence and prominence of feature management across the software industry and how the technology is decreasing deployment risk, ensuring measurable business value with each release, and giving developers peace of mind,” said Ravi Tharisayi, LaunchDarkly Senior Director of Product Marketing. “This report provides a unique glimpse into how developers and senior leaders prioritize feature management software and how they plan to use this software moving forward.”

The 2022 State of Feature Management report’s findings also further validate a notion uncovered in LaunchDarkly’s report on psychological safety earlier this year. Both studies dove into how software developers implement software such as feature management as a means to mitigate the immense stress and pressure they feel leading up to major events such as a product release. For example, 48% of respondents to the State of Feature Management survey reported having greater confidence and less stress when releasing software. At the same time, 87% of software & IT pros say feature management somewhat or significantly improves their overall productivity.

The data from this year’s State of Feature Management Report comes from the responses of 1,000 surveyed software engineers, developers, release managers, product managers, platform managers, and software architects working at companies with a minimum of 200 employees. LaunchDarkly and Wakefield Research conducted this survey to gain insights surrounding the feature management industry, what workers are looking for, in addition to common and creative feature management use cases.

To learn more and download the full report, visit this page.

About LaunchDarkly
LaunchDarkly isn’t just a leader in feature management — it’s the first scalable feature management platform. Feature management allows development teams to innovate faster by fundamentally transforming how software is delivered to customers. With the ability to gradually release new software features to any segment of users on any platform, DevOps teams can standardize safe releases at scale, accelerate their journey to the cloud and collaborate more effectively with business teams. Today, LaunchDarkly deploys peaks of 20 trillion feature flags a day, and that number continues to grow. Founded in 2014 in Oakland, California by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly has been named on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, InfoWorld’s 2021 Technology of the Year list, and the Enterprise Tech 30 list. Learn more at launchdarkly.com.

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