Development and Deployment at Facebook
https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/w~feit/papers/FB13IC.pdf
Method
"Dror G. Feitelson Hebrew University Eitan Frachtenberg Facebook Kent L. Beck Facebook."
Population
"Facebook has roughly 1,000 development engineers and three release engineers... These engineers commit code to the version control system up to 500 times a day, recording changes in some 3,000 files"
What it does not show
No incident or defect-rate data. Describes the mechanisms and their scale but never reports how often they caught a problem before full exposure, nor the maintenance cost of the flag system over time. Two of three authors worked at the company being described.
Dror G. Feitelson, Eitan Frachtenberg, Kent L. Beck
A concrete account of dark launch, flag-gated release and staged rollout operating together at scale: code live on all servers but hidden from users, a gating system deciding “which users see which features of the code” by criteria such as country or age, and rollout through internal-only, a few-thousand-machine stage, and full deployment — with rollback normally reverting a single commit.
Tier III: Insider engineering report — two of three authors were employed by the company described — descriptive with counted production metrics, no control group.