The Toggle is a digital trade journal that highlights the vital role technology plays in organizations and companies around the world—and the men and women who make it all work. Our editors cover everything from data privacy and cybersecurity to enterprise software and emerging applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In software, a toggle is a simple way to enable or disable a feature. Toggles can be used to turn features on or off, switch between display modes, and more. Toggles are common in most everyday technologies, including hardware devices and mobile apps.

A toggle can be anything from a single “if” statement to complex decision trees, which act upon a wide variety of conditions. These conditions can include fitness test results from other features in the codebase, a setting in your feature management platform, or a variable provided by a config file. Savvy teams seek to limit the number of toggles in their codebase and keep these inactive as much as possible. This reduces the maintenance burden and provides greater visibility into the state of the codebase.

When creating new features, it’s common for teams to use toggles to enable or disable functionality in the codebase while they are writing their code. This allows them to deliver functionality faster, avoid regressions and ensures that the code is stable before being pushed into production. However, a team should be vigilant and make sure that the toggles aren’t left lingering after their purpose has run its course. The more idle toggles a team has, the harder it will be to manage the codebase. A savvy approach is to add a task on the team’s backlog or build in an automated process into their feature management platform to remove toggles as soon as they become irrelevant.