The Future of Feature Management: Release Monitoring is Critical to Enterprise Success

In its State of Feature Management and Experimentation 2024 report, Split by Harness reveals that only 1 in 6 of those surveyed are successful with Feature Management and Experimentation without the ability to monitor system performance and user behavior at the feature level.

Harness, the Modern Software Delivery Platform company, and Split Software, a leading Feature Management and Experimentation provider recently acquired by Harness, released groundbreaking insights in collaboration with LeadDev. The report, The State of Feature Management and Experimentation 2024, surveyed 500 engineering leaders and underscores the critical role feature management and experimentation tools play in helping software teams succeed within the maturing practice.

According to the survey, 83% of senior leaders prioritize feature management as a way to embed experimentation into their developer cultures. However, engineering teams are not succeeding without the right tools in place. Specifically, only 1 in 6 say they were successful without the ability to monitor system performance and user behavior at the feature level, an integral capability of robust feature management solutions like Split by Harness.

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Other key insights from the survey include:

• Safety & optimization are top priorities: 78% of respondents identified risk mitigation and feature optimization as essential components of their feature management strategy.
• Release monitoring is critical to feature management success: 82% of successful feature management respondents say they monitor at the feature level, while only 16% who do not monitor believe they are successful.
• Experimentation requires best practices and proper tooling: 46% of organizations not conducting experiments point to a lack of best practices as a major barrier, while 37% cite technical debt as a hindrance.
• Engineering takes the reins on experimentation: The responsibility for experimentation is increasingly shared between engineering and product teams, with 42% of the leadership now held by engineering.
• Integration with CI/CD is the future: The future of feature management tools lies in their integration with CI/CD solutions, as 83% of leaders expect such connectivity.

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“The challenges of mitigating risk at enterprises with over 500 engineers are enormous, especially under pressure to innovate rapidly,” said Trevor Stuart, co-founder of Split Software. “Knowing the impact of every feature with proper release monitoring and minimizing the blast radius of potential failures is now more critical than ever.”

With feature flags and CI/CD capabilities becoming inseparable, Split Software’s integration within the Harness platform promises a unified solution for managing feature flags and CI/CD pipelines, streamlining operations for engineering teams.