Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

Here at Gradle, Inc., we don’t just talk about Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). We practice it every day. We know that companies that make DPE a priority have focused, productive developers who deliver better code faster while experiencing the joy of coding. That’s why Gradle has engineering resources dedicated to ensuring our developers get the same benefits as our customers. And we eat our own dog food. (Or, if you prefer, we drink our own champagne. Then again, not all of our code is written in France, so maybe we’re drinking our own sparkling wine.) That includes using Develocity Test Distribution. 

Develocity provides a complete look at the build system, its performance, and individual build details. We recently had a build cache node crash that was impacting build times. In this post, we’ll go through the information Develocity generated before, during, and after the build cache node crash that made it easy to determine this was the cause of the slow build performance problem.

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.”

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.