FE: Establish criteria to remove flipper facility_locator_show_community_cares

[dsinla]

Description

As we investigate each Facilities related Flipper, document the criteria and timeline for when it should be removed.

Refer to https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms/issues/10656

Acceptance Criteria

• [x] Criteria for Flipper removal is created in this ticket

CMS Team

Please check the team(s) that will do this work.

• [ ] Program
• [ ] Platform CMS Team
• [ ] Sitewide Crew
• [ ] ⭐️ Sitewide CMS
• [ ] ⭐️ Public Websites
• [X] ⭐️ Facilities
• [ ] ⭐️ User support

[mmiddaugh]

The following may be relevant Remove feature flag code for facilityLocatorShowCommunityCares https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/6065

[ryguyk]

@mmiddaugh The ticket you point out is, indeed, relevant. As far as I can tell, though, this was closed without any meaningful work. The feature flag is still present.

Some more findings

• This issue discusses the need to "invert" this feature flag. Rather than have a flag that indicates whether this feature should be on, the decision was to have a flag that indicates whether this feature should be off. This way, if there are problems determining the value of the feature flag, the feature will be on. That work was completed in this PR. The feature flag facility_locator_show_community_cares was replaced with facilities_ppms_suppress_community_care, which rendered the existing Flipper feature flag (the one in this issue, facility_locator_show_community_cares) no longer applicable. It can be removed.
• Later, there was additional work based on this ticket that adds another Flipper feature flag to suppress all community-care searches (seemingly in the event that things with these searches are determined to be broken, so that the options can be removed from the search dropdown). This does not specifically affect this current ticket, but it's useful to mention here as it's related.

Steps for removal

vets-api

• This feature flag is no longer needed and can be removed.
• HOWEVER, this is a very interesting case because this feature flag is being used to test some behavior around Flipper toggles in general.
• So:
  • The entry in config/features.yml can be removed.
  • event_subscriber_spec.rb needs to be updated to use a different feature toggle for testing.
  • feature_toggles_controller_spec.rb needs to be updated to use a different feature toggle for testing. It's worth noting that at least one of these tests seems to require a Flipper feature flag that is enabled.
  • Should there be feature toggles specifically for testing? Who would own that? A: Platform should own broad vets-api tests. (Anna Carey wrote the test, we think that was a Platform person at the time, 4yrs ago.)

vets-website

Here is a draft PR that implements the vets-website removal outlined below.

• The code using this feature flag as a gate for the feature has already been removed (it was replaced by the code using facilities_ppms_suppress_community_care).
• There are, however, some references to facility_locator_show_community_cares that remain.
  • One is the entry in featureFlagNames.js. This can be removed.
  • The rest are in files outside Facilities' ownership. They are test files that have seemingly copied actual Flipper json values into mocks. They can be removed, but we'll likely need a code review from each of the owners.

[jilladams]

From scrum: Here's a follow-up implementation ticket. That ticket covers:

• Removing the vets-api test or replacing the flipper used in that test with a different one
  • Platform support ticket & follow up to see if Plat is willing to take over that test & suggest a flipper
• Finish the vets-website PR and merge

[ryguyk]

Closing this issue. The discovery is done. Refer to follow-up ticket for next steps.