Toggle is a digital trade journal highlighting the vital role technology plays in organizations across the industry spectrum and the men and women who make it happen. It provides a look at the challenges they face and how they’re tackling them with innovative solutions, from artificial intelligence and machine learning to cloud technologies.
In software development, a toggle is a feature that allows a developer to control the behavior of an element in a web page or application. It is similar to an on/off switch, but can also enable or disable an entire set of features, rather than just enabling one. Toggles are useful in software for testing and managing A/B tests as well as providing a way to limit the number of users who see a new feature during its rollout phase.
The name of a toggle should be descriptive and easy to understand, so that someone in the future looking at your codebase can quickly figure out what it does and how it works. The best practice is to give the toggle a short and meaningful name which can be used as an annotation in source code, a comment in a release note or even in the description of a dashboard widget.
Using static files for management of toggle configuration can become cumbersome at scale. As a result many teams move their toggle configuration to some type of centralized store, often an existing application database. This approach is usually paired with some type of admin UI which allows system operators, testers and product managers to view and modify toggle configuration.
