Feature Lifecycle
Every feature flag has a natural life: it's created, developed, rolled out, goes fully live, and — for non-permanent flags — should eventually be removed from your code and archived. Featureflow tracks this journey automatically and shows it as the Lifecycle Status timeline on the feature's Overview tab.
The current stage is computed for you from real traffic and targeting state — there is nothing to set manually. Hover the status in the feature list to see the full timeline:
The stages
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Created | The feature exists but hasn't received traffic in any environment yet. |
| Development | The feature is receiving traffic in at least one non-production environment, but not yet in production. |
| Rollout | The feature is receiving traffic in production, but is either disabled or serving a mix of variants via targeting rules or a gradual rollout — it's on its way out to everyone. |
| Live | Every production environment where the feature is active is serving 100% of traffic to a single variant. The rollout is complete. |
| Stale | A non-permanent feature has been serving one variant to all production traffic for longer than its stale period. The flag has done its job — it's time to remove it from your code and archive it. |
| Archived | The feature has been archived and is no longer active. |
Stage detection is driven by impression statistics — a feature "receives traffic" when SDKs report evaluations for it in an environment.
Permanent features
Some flags aren't meant to be removed — kill switches, ops toggles, entitlement flags. Mark these as permanent in the feature's settings. Permanent features skip Rollout and never become Stale: once they're active in production they're simply Live.
Why this matters
Flags that outlive their purpose become technical debt: dead branches in your code and noise in your dashboard. The lifecycle status gives you an at-a-glance answer to the two questions that matter most:
- Is this rollout finished? — look for Live.
- Can this flag be deleted from the code? — look for Stale, then remove the flag from your codebase and archive and delete the feature.