Optimizely Enhances Free Feature Flagging Plan with Experimentation, Targeted Rollouts

New capabilities validate product quality and drive customer engagement across the development lifecycle

Optimizely, the world’s leader in progressive delivery and experimentation, announced that its free feature flagging plan for development teams, Rollouts, now also includes A/B testing and feature configuration. This more comprehensive solution continues to be available as the free tier in Optimizely’s enterprise Full Stack platform. With the new, enhanced Rollouts plan, teams have a single set of development tools at their fingertips combining feature flags and Optimizely’s industry-leading experimentation capabilities to build, iterate, and ship new features safely, quickly, and with confidence to meet customer experience and business metrics.

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Demonstrate Value, Not Just Velocity, with Experimentation

Smarter software delivery isn’t just about reducing risk, it’s also about delivering value. Rollouts users can now run an experiment on a feature flag to measure the impact of an update or change. With more than 1 million experiments run on Optimizely’s platform, Rollouts users benefit from an easy-to-use, end-to-end dashboard that guarantees test integrity and supports accurate results analysis to inform product development and business decisions. Using feature configuration, product development teams can include variables in their code that can be parameterized and remotely configured from the Optimizely dashboard without redeploying code. By instrumenting variables upfront when coding a feature, teams test permutations of the feature without having to redeploy or write new code. Powered by the integrated Optimizely Stats Engine, Rollouts includes real-time data streaming and analytics of experiments to further inform the product build process and launch.

“The enhanced Optimizely Rollouts plan enables development teams to easily use data to launch the products that customers want,” said Lawrence Bruhmuller, CTO at Optimizely. “Marrying progressive delivery and experimentation is the best approach for product and engineering teams to validate product quality and customer engagement. Developers have never been more important to a company’s success, and today we’re giving them an even more powerful way to work productively and drive business value.”

More Feature Control with New Targeted Rollouts

Optimizely is also announcing a new capability in both its free and paid Full Stack plans, called targeted rollouts. Targeted rollouts provides teams using progressive delivery even more control during gradual rollouts through more flexible rules and configurations by audience and development environment. The new feature delivers enhanced capabilities beyond simple Boolean (on/off) feature flags to provide product development teams more fine-grained controls that include the ability to deliver different experiences for key audiences. For instance, a food delivery app team could progressively roll out a new feature to 10% of users in San Francisco, 5% of users in New York City, and 1% across the rest of the United States. With targeted rollouts, they can also specify different configurations by audience and development environment to deliver different experiences for each market.

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Building a Better Developer Experience

Over the past year, thousands of developers have adopted Optimizely Rollouts to gain more control over their release processes to mitigate risk and ship faster so they can deliver better, more customer-centric products and experiences. Optimizely is committed to improving the developer experience to be more productive, flexible, and impactful. In addition to today’s latest advancements, Optimizely has also recently introduced out-of-the-box support for teams to use progressive delivery and experimentation in microservices; searchable change history; automated data file management; additional SDKs for languages including Go, Swift, and React; and IDE integrations. The company also launched the Optimizely Developer Slack community where developers can share their work with feature flags, progressive delivery, and experimentation.

The enhanced Rollouts plan with experimentation and feature configuration is available starting today automatically for existing and new users. Targeted rollouts is rolling out today in beta and will be generally available to all free Rollouts and paid Full Stack users this summer. To learn more about today’s new features for product development teams, check out our blog post and Optimizely’s Full Stack plans.

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