Develocity 2023.4 caps a strong year of product innovation for the engineering team at Gradle along three key dimensions. First, this year we expanded the market surface area for Develocity with GA support Bazel and sbt (in beta).
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and Gradle Inc. announced last week that Gradle has entered into a collaboration with the Foundation as a Targeted Platinum Sponsor. This involves Gradle providing a free instance of Develocity (formerly Gradle Enterprise) that runs as a shared ASF infrastructure service available for use by all Apache projects and contributors. Gradle aims to scale Develocity build and test performance acceleration and failure analytics benefits across the ASF community of 320 active open-source software projects.
This is a cautionary tale about the consequences of not investing enough in Developer Experience, what to do about it if you find yourself having to address those consequences, and how to avoid getting into this situation in the first place.
The first annual Developer Productivity Engineering Summit will take place on November 2-3 in San Francisco. This two-day, dual-track event features the leading minds in Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). The theme is “Next Practices for Transforming the Developer Experience.”
In a recent Inc. Magazine article, “Google Has a Productivity Problem That Has Stumped Managers for 113 Years. Will Sundar Pichai Be the First to Solve It?” (Aug. 2022), Pichai said the tech giant’s productivity levels do not match its growing headcount. Google executives have reportedly said they want to “get better results faster” with the people they have, and employees have been warned to boost performance or “there will be blood on the streets.”
In the course of engineering new solutions that improve developer productivity by speeding up builds and tests, Gradle will introduce new concepts and new enabling technologies. Here we will introduce and explore the concepts and technologies associated with performance consistency and performance continuity and the benefits of achieving elevated states of both. Let’s begin by defining performance consistency and contrasting it with performance continuity.
Gradle Inc. announced recently that it closed a $27 million Series C funding round doubling its venture capital investment haul to almost $55 million. This round represents a significant endorsement by the venture community of the emerging software practice called Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). DPE takes an engineering approach — rather than a people management approach — to solving developer productivity challenges and improving the developer experience.
Develocity is positioned as a key enabling technology for DPE and the only technology that provides an end-to-end solution. To date venture firms investing in DPE include Bain Capital Partners, DCVC, Harmony Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, StepStone Group, and True Ventures.
What does the smart money see in DPE?
Test Distribution is an approach that accelerates test execution and complements build caching while addressing many of the limitations of single-machine parallelism and CI fanout. It does this by extending test parallelism which farms out test execution to remote executors. Along with Build Cache, it is one of the major build and test acceleration features available in Develocity.
We caught up with Cedric Champeau, consulting member of the technical staff at Oracle, a former engineer on the Gradle Build Tool core team and a Groovy committer, to ask him about his experience with Test Distribution (TD) while working on the Gradle Build Tool open source project.
A test is “flaky” whenever it can produce both “passing” and “failing” results for the same code. Test flakiness is a bit like having diabetes. It’s a chronic condition you can never fully cure and put behind you. Even if only 0.1% of your tests are flaky, with thousands of tests you can have problems with a considerable portion of your builds. This is common to even medium-sized development teams. Left unmanaged flaky tests can render a body (or body of tests) severely damaged. But your prognosis is good if you continually measure and act on the relevant health indicators.
Did you know that Develocity Maven Build Scans now offers a Dependencies section that visualizes the resolved dependency graph used to form the classpaths for each module. It is available for every Maven captured build, without the need to invoke a specific Maven goal. Maven dependency resolution visualization requires Develocity Maven extension 1.4+.
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