How to implement a limited feature rollout (language agnostic) to your users?

Question

I would like to know some common or best practices of rolling out a new website feature to a select group of the userbase.

The users could be, for example, based solel

Answer 1

For a random selection process I like the concept of asking each customer when they have a successful login if they want to participate in beta testing, once the total required or wanted quantity of users is reached you stop asking. In the database I tend to store what server to redirect the user to and run a standard script that moves each user to the correct location upon login.

We design our app development months in advance and avoid changes to the existing schema. The reason is very obvious, of course this is not always possible so when we have a change like this we always fully document the change when it is written and plan the migration for this field as early as possible. This way we have a battle plan of what changes are being made and we can put in place the best solution possible for us. This unfortunately does change depending on the circumstances.

We always run multiple environments, we have production, development and beta generally. This means we 1 do not mess with production services that equal money, we don't have people breaking code and pulling the service offline when optimizing.

Development uses GIT for version monitoring and users never see this as we get all sorts of weird and wonderful experiments uploaded for playing with. It also uses it's own database vs the live data.

With beta, we do migrate specific user data generally but recently we have had a better experience with duplicating the entire database and planning a specific date for the start of beta, what this does is allows users to opt out of beta and others to opt in with minimal changes required to support this option. What we generally do is migrate new data between the 2 databases once per day, new opt-ins and opt-outs only take effect from the time the data has been migrated to the other platform.

We have also had success on a small scale using the existing production database for beta testing some new functions that operated out of their own table so depending on what you're doing data wise using the same live database could be a good option.

I hope this is useful for you... good luck with your testing mate.