Better QA, Testing, and Debugging with DevCycle Self-Targeting

Do you ever find yourself lacking access to a codebase, database, or a tool? Do you lack context around why a change is made, who made a change, or why your different environments may be broken? Whether your company has a large, dedicated QA team or you manage a more integrated type of testing and debugging process during your software delivery lifecycle, developers need a safe environment to test their code. From development to staging to production, debugging and testing behind a feature flag allows you to find issues, fix them, and redeploy code faster and more safely. That’s why DevCycle is excited to announce the launch of our new feature—Self-Targeting!

Self-Targeting with DevCycle allows you to easily serve yourself different variations of a feature without having to modify targeting rules in each environment. Everyone on the team can now easily (and without risk) tie a User ID to a DevCycle profile and use it to target themselves, allowing your developers to safely debug the code they’re working on behind a feature flag. With a simple dropdown menu, you can safely and quickly toggle between which environments and variations you see, allowing you to test, debug, and deploy fixes fast.

Making the most of targeting rules and overrides

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Self-Targeting is just the beginning of the ability to override targeting rules on feature flags to make QA, testing, and debugging easier. By introducing the ability to assign a User ID to a DevCycle user, it opens up more opportunity for extended flexibility in your feature flag management platform. Targeting rule overrides can allow for more complex and temporary permissions, access control, audit logging, and more.

Self-Targeting gives users across the organization from developers to QA engineers to product managers a better way to manage an efficient software delivery lifecycle and release more reliable features. For instance:

• The Product Manager benefits because their dev teams can deploy faster and more reliably. Their dev teams can easily go into nearly any feature variation to run tests and fix problems before they go live to customers. PMs can also force themselves into a feature flag in order to manually test and evaluate the end-user experience before turning it on for all users.
• The Developer benefits because they can toggle between environments and feature variations quickly and override targeting rules that potentially control the feature for millions of users. Self-Targeting is seamless to use, integrated into the natural feature flag workflow (in the DevCycle dashboard as well as the CLI), helping devs test, debug, and deploy code to fix issues safely behind feature flags before they reach customers.
• The QA Engineer benefits because they can also toggle between environments and feature variations quickly and easily, making the testing and optimization process much faster.
• The Business benefits because the software is generally released faster and more reliably, leading to fewer outages, SLA breaches, etc.—driving more customer loyalty and ultimately more revenue.

Faster QA, testing, and debugging with self-targeting benefits the whole business

Self-Targeting is a way for the whole team to make testing and debugging a priority at all stages of your release lifecycle. Product managers and developers alike can participate and ensure features are built correctly and safely behind feature flags while simultaneously creating a faster software delivery pipeline. Self-Targeting allows you to continuously test and continuously deliver without needless permission management toil or complicated targeting rules that could introduce outages or performance issues for your end-users.

Please check out our documentation to read more about Self-Targeting with DevCycle and/or join us in our Discord community to ask any questions you may have or let us know what you think. If you’re more of a do-it-yourself type of person, feel free to sign up for a free trial or request a demo with someone from our team.