Feature Previews for the Front End

TLDR

Allowed our front-end to be deployed on "feature preview" deployment slots by just creating a PR with a specific branch name pattern; this allows changes to be accessible on a live environment before the PRs are merged.

My role

Tech Lead of the team that interacts with the front-end, however, the feature is not connected to the role. I simply saw an opportunity for an improvement in our workflows, pitched it to higher ups, and then implemented it.

Implementation

I wrote a blog post about this here.

In essence, this functionality works by allowing end users to inject a specific header into all requests made to the load balancer that serves the client, and the load balancer then forwards it an appropriate target. More details can be found on the blog post.

Challenges

• The first version of this solution directly tied a few static urls to these "feature previews", making it so that everybody involved had just a few test accounts to work with. However, once I figured out the "header injection" solution, the decision to make the functionality dynamic and "plug-and-play" became a no-brainer.

Impact

• This allowed our front-end devs to make their changes accessible to Product Owners/Tech Leads/QA way sooner in the front-end change lifecycle, resulting in more a iterative development process with less surprises at the end.