I've recently been asked by my supervisor to prepare a solution in which multiple pieces of logic throughout our application can be reverted back to an earlier piece of code while the application is live. In effect, I need to prepare something like a flag or an indicator that can be dynamically activated to switch all instances of code in our application, from the new version back to the old one.
The new logic was prepared by a new member of our team and we are concerned about memory leaks that will emerge once the code goes to production, and we want a solution in place that will allow us to turn those changes off and return to the original code if necessary.
if (new_code == ON)
{
New Logic
}
else
{
Old logic
}
This project was originally meant to help get rid of build and compile warnings during our build process so it affects code ranging from function arguments to variable declarations, so there's no one single type of code that will be affected. We are running off a tuxedo stack but implementing a tuxedo config file to effect this change isn't recommended according to one of our senior developers. I'm not aware of a similar solution, though.
Any ideas? Thanks!
Would it work? Sure. Is it a good idea? No. You now have the risk of the new code, plus the risk of bugs in your switch code, plus the risk of what happens if you switch from one to the other in mid-run. You shouldn't be doing this, its far more likely to cause trouble than just deploying the changes directly.
What you should do- if you're really concerned about it, don't deploy it. Put it through additional testing until you're comfortable with it. Then when you do deploy it, have a plan to roll back to a previous version without these changes if something slips through testing.