Once we have planned stages, we have to define how we’ll pick the users participating in the canary:

Randomly: we can send a percentage of users to the canary by random chance.

By region: deploy the canary one geographical area at a time. For example, we could choose a follow-the-night strategy and release during each region’s nighttime, when there are the least users online.

Early adopter program: giving users a chance to opt-in (or opt-out) the canary program might lead to the best results. Early adopters are more likely to offer quality feedback.

Dogfooding: this term relates to the saying “eating your own dog food” and involves releasing the canary to internal users and employees first.