Then we’d be nervous removing the old stuff cause who knows why it was left there and who knows if they’d want it back on again…
To me, it's about having enough time to do this in a sprint, and that means it really needs to be a post-launch Jira ticket. Which I've seen done maybe once.
The advantage to this approach is that you do the hard part of removing the flag (ie, thinking through all the parts of the code that need to be cleaned up) while everything is fresh in your mind. Otherwise, you end up spending more time regaining all of the context, and are more likely to leave some vestigial dead code because you aren't sure it isn't needed any more (this is probably less of a risk with languages that lend themselves well to static analysis that can identify dead code, but these tools are never perfect).
- There were hundreds of them, some of them going back to the garage days, multiple years old. Some would turn on/off major functionality core to the product. For example, this was an ecommerce product - one toggle was "show/hide the buy button". (I think that one is staying in.) - This was all hand-rolled, pre-LaunchDarkly stuff, but at least they were all in one place. I diffed Production, Staging, and a one-off UAT environment - the toggles were MASSIVELY different across each.
Oh absolutely. Feature flags are great, but you definitely need discipline to make sure you clean things up. The longer the unused code rots, the harder it is to remove it.