Developer Productivity Engineering -- May

The subject of the next Showdown is Open Source at Scale and Productivity Engineering and will take place on Thursday, July 15, 2021 (10am SF | 1pm NY | 6pm London | 7pm Berlin).In this episode thought leaders from the open source world weigh in on thought-provoking technology choices they support or interesting practices they recommend to scale their projects, optimize productivity, and ensure their devs have a great experience.

This episode’s all-star panelists include Josh Long (Spring), Fred Simon (JFrog), Luke Daley (Gradle), and Jigyasa Grover (Twitter).

EXPERT TAKES

Eric Wendelin on getting the most out of your build performance trend data

Gradle Enterprise Trends & Insights allows dev teams to respond proactively to systemic problems and longer-term performance regressions. It does this by providing a Trends Dashboard that makes key metrics and KPIs more observable and actionable. In my most recent blog post, I share two simple but powerful tips for using trend data to interpret and evaluate build performance. I then demonstrate these principles by analyzing trends from an actual Gradle Enterprise customer.

I conclude that since “faster builds” can mean different things, it’s best to have a goal in mind and focus on a specific aspect of build performance. Also, isolate the builds you’re interested in, and which metrics and trends will help you best measure your goal. And be sure to take advantage of the views, filters, and data granularity options in Gradle Enterprise that will help you visualize your goal and measure results. Check out the complete Blog and give me your thoughts.

PRODUCT NEWS

Auto scaling Test Distribution agents is now much more convenient

Gradle Enterprise Test Distribution —for both Gradle and Maven builds — speeds up tests significantly by distributing them to remote agents. A recent Blog post explores how to automatically scale the number of remote agents based on current demand, and understand the impact this can have on build runtime.

Ideally, remote agents are only running when developers need them. The new auto scaling feature introduced in Gradle Enterprise 2021.2 can do just that. The basic idea is that as remote agents are deployed on a platform such as Kubernetes, an auto scaler constantly monitors demand for remote agents by polling a status endpoint in Gradle Enterprise and adjusts the number of replicas accordingly.

The key benefit of the Test Distribution auto scaling feature is a reduction in infrastructure costs incurred by running remote agents, while keeping the advantage of reduced feedback times for developers.

Read the Blog Post

IDEAS & Insights

Addressing Maven dependency management challenges

Gradle Enterprise Maven Build Scans now offers a Dependencies section that visualizes the resolved dependency graph used to form the classpaths for each module. This makes it dramatically more efficient to debug dependency-related build problems by providing a level of data visibility — critical to conducting failure and root cause analysis — that you do not get using Maven alone.

For example, you can now more easily inspect and analyze the dependency resolution results for any build and understand the actual versions selected and where substitutions occurred. A complete list of key features associated with this capability are described in a recent Blog post.

Read the Post

industry NEWS

Android Experts Share DevProd Best Practices in the Last DevProdEng Showdown!

The topic for the last DevProdEng Showdown was Android Architecture and Developer Productivity Engineering at Scale. In this episode Android gurus from some of the most famous technology and global business brands debated the best ways to optimize their codebase architecture and scale their developer productivity processes. This episode’s all-star panelists were Angella Derington (Dropbox), César Puerta (Twitter), Jake Wharton (Square) and Michael Bailey (American Express). Congrats to Michael Bailey who was judged by the audience as this month’s Showdown winner.

Check out how the experts responded to the following questions and decide for yourself who won the Showdown:

Android architecture components, yes or no?
How many modules is too many modules? Where do you draw the line?
If you could ask AGP for one single bug fix or feature, what would it be?
What’s your position on mocks and fakes?
What’s your philosophy when it comes to legacy code? What’s the right balance between updating it and building new functionality?
What’s the best way to architect apps for evolving functionality?
How do you balance feature development with test coverage?

Watch Now!

Featured Upcoming Event

Next DevProdEng Showdown features open source project titans