Developer Productivity Engineering Blog

Flaky, or non-deterministic, tests are a serious and prevalent problem in modern software development. If your application interacts with browsers, external devices or services, or has asynchronous behavior, it’s likely you have suffered from flaky tests. Martin Fowler has this to say about flaky tests:

Non-deterministic tests have two problems, firstly they are useless, secondly they are a virulent infection that can completely ruin your entire test suite. As a result they need to be dealt with as soon as you can, before your entire deployment pipeline is compromised. — Martin Fowler on Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests

Flaky tests compromise deployment pipelines by slowing them down and decreasing confidence in the correctness of changes. When changes regularly fail due to unrelated flaky tests, time is wasted, features are delayed, and developers are demotivated to make changes.

Gradle 6.0 is the culmination of several years of innovative improvements in Dependency Management. Embracing the idea that there is more to software composition and reuse than just putting a set of jar files on the classpath, Gradle now offers a new metadata format to richly define software components that are often made up of multiple files, different variants and specific constraints on their dependencies.

Testing takes the overwhelming majority of time during software builds. A single test can waste countless hours of building time — a single failure may cause an entire CI pipeline to have to be re-run. Ugh.

In this post, I will show you how to identify slow and unstable tests using the new Tests Dashboard in Gradle Enterprise 2019.4 for Gradle and Maven builds. The dashboard visualizes test results across many builds for tests executed by Gradle’s built-in Test task and Maven’s SureFire plugin.

Whether producing private or public components, most projects are built with multiple software libraries interacting together. Aside from knowing what to publish and how to do so, this webcast covers strategies for streamlining the publication and integration processes.

Although ephemeral builds can be nice to test changes in isolation, there are trade-offs for doing so. One of those trade-offs is dependency download times.

In Gradle Enterprise 2019.3, the dependency download metrics in the performance and trends dashboards can be used to look at dependency download times and debug issues. For example, let’s look at the dependency download times for the Gradle project itself for all builds run in the last four weeks.

In this webinar, Hans Dockter, CEO & Founder of Gradle, talked about the emerging practice of developer productivity engineering, a discipline of using data to improve essential development processes from build/test to CI/CD.

Changing one dependency declaration can have unexpected side effects through its transitive dependencies. For an example of tightly-coupled dependencies, let’s look at a simple Spring Boot project with the following build.gradle file.

Have you ever had an infrastructure failure break your build, or perhaps been forced to stop working in order to fix broken build configuration? Changes to development infrastructure often happen unbeknownst to the engineers it serves. Many problems go unreported, but chip away at our productivity much more than we realize. It is important to identify and stop non-verification failures (those not caused by routine development, such as compile and test failures) before they disrupt your organization. To combat this, we are pleased to introduce new failure analysis tools.

Whether you use a mono-repository or multi-repository approach for your sources, managing dependencies is central to productivity by reusing artifacts and ensuring a quality build. A single incorrect dependency can break existing code, introduce a vulnerability or simply prevent your project from building.

Android builds can be complex and challenging to optimize, yet Android teams usually have the fewest resources to work on the build. In this webinar, Jason Schroeder from Salesforce and Rooz Mohazzabi from Gradle discuss top Android build issues an how to solve them.