Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

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.”

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.

In a recent DevProdEng Showdown! Android gurus from some of the most famous technology and global business brands shared their best tips for accelerating Android build and test feedback cycle times. Here is what our friends at Twich, JP Morgan Chase, Delta, and Kaiser Permanente had to say. You can watch the video segment or read their comments (edited for clarity) below.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

Each Develocity engineering project team is responsible for monitoring their own flaky tests. When enough flaky tests have accumulated in the test suite, the team meets for a ‘Flaky Test Day’ to identify and fix flaky tests. In this post, we explain the importance of having flaky test days, when to schedule them and some of the Develocity development team’s favorite best practices for identifying, prioritizing and fixing flaky tests.

The software landscape is fragmented and specialized and will continue to remain so.  Developers have their own beloved tools for development, builds, testing, and so on. Often referred to as a tyranny of choice, this fragmentation is becoming increasingly intentional, especially among the ever-blooming open source development landscape.

Fighting this trend is more often than not a boondoggle for organizations, and ultimately, standardization can even lead to anti-patterns.  Realizing this, how can you promote developer productivity in your company if you have the common pattern of a polyglot build system environment?  Our own Develocity Front End team has implemented both the practice and toolchain, and have seen impressive results: