Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

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Top 3 Developer Productivity Engineering Metrics Provided by Develocity

Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) is a practice for improving developer productivity leveraging technologies—rather than exclusively relying on traditional management best practices. This includes foremost analytic technologies for observing and collecting the many metrics and indicators of the overall health of your toolchain in terms of speed and reliability. Develocity captures, records, and presents these metrics. We wanted to learn which of these metrics are the most important, so we asked our users!



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From Hour-Long Builds to Streamlined Productivity: The Spring Boot Journey

In the dynamic world of open-source projects, the Spring Boot team, a vital part of the Java ecosystem, grappled with a challenge slowing down their progress: extensive build times. Their build process, both local and on CI, would take an hour or more, affecting their productivity. The turning point? The deployment of Develocity.

In this blog post, I will walk you through the highlights of this journey and provide the transcript of my interview with Andy Wilkinson, staff engineer at VMware and Spring team developer, from which this piece is based.



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Determine the Root Cause of GitHub Actions Failures Faster with Develocity

Earlier this year, Aurimas Liutikas from the Google AndroidX team joined our DPE Lowdown webcast to talk about how Develocity has helped them troubleshoot build and test failures faster in their GitHub Actions CI environment. Since then, we’ve heard from many companies that already use or plan to adopt GitHub Actions as their CI solution and want to understand how Gradle Build Tool and Develocity fit into the CI build experience. In this post, we will cover the official Gradle Build GitHub action that the AndroidX team is using to integrate with Develocity and some of the build troubleshooting best practices Aurimas shared in his talk.



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Seven Ways Netflix Uses Develocity to Manage Gradle Plugins

Roberto Perez Alcolea of the Netflix JVM Ecosystem team recently shared some of his team’s use cases and best practices for using Develocity to manage Gradle plugins in their builds. The Nebula project itself is a set of Gradle plugins that eliminate boilerplate build logic and provide sane conventions for simplifying build scripts.



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Netflix Pursues Soft DevEx Goals with Hard DevProd Metrics using Test Distribution

At Netflix, improving developer happiness is a goal of paramount importance since it is highly correlated with developer productivity. Netflix Engineering has experienced significant benefits from their investments in improving the developer experience and productivity by using automation, tools and data rather than by management decree and best practices. This article highlights their success using Test Distribution to speed up test cycles by over 12X and provides many other productivity insights.



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Improving Micrometer’s Build with Develocity

This summer the Gradle Team provisioned a Develocity instance for the Micrometer open-source project and helped us a lot in optimizing our Micrometer build. Micrometer’s build has been enjoying the advantages of the Gradle Build Tool since the inception of the project. Introducing Develocity has led to a significant number of improvements to the team’s developer productivity.



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Test Distribution In Action: A Practitioner’s Feedback from the Trenches

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.



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Developer Productivity Engineering at Elastic: Avoiding the Cost of Inaction

Like many companies, the software development experience at Elastic was starting to become negatively impacted under the increasing strain of slowing builds and inefficient process for testing and debugging. And, the pain was only expected to increase in line with the growth of development teams, code bases, and repositories. The cost of inaction was projected to soon become unbearable.

In this webcast, Mark Vieira, Senior Software Engineer at Elastic discusses with Gradle, Inc. CEO, Hans Dockter, how Elastic overcame the natural resistance to change their process and toolset by quantifying the Cost of Inaction and blazing a new path toward build engineering excellence.



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