Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

Roberto Perez Alcolea of the Netflix JVM Ecosystem team recently shared some of his team’s use cases and best practices for using Gradle Enterprise 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.

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.

This summer the Gradle Team provisioned a Gradle Enterprise 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 Gradle Enterprise has led to a significant number of improvements to the team’s developer productivity.

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 Gradle Enterprise. 

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.

Stash recently deployed Gradle Enterprise and is already seeing benefits. We caught up with Joel Parrish, Principal Engineer at Stash to get the low down and he shared his experience and results to date.

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.

How can you use data visualizations with your build data to improve the reliability and performance of your build?

How does LinkedIn create a culture of developer productivity that is capable of building over 100,000 times a day?