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Develocity Support for the
Android Build System
With Develocity for Android Studio you can accelerate build and test feedback cycle times and make troubleshooting more efficient by leveraging modern performance acceleration and analytic technologies.
Key Develocity Benefits for Android Studio Users
Track local and CI build times and debug performance bottlenecks. Develocity helps you analyze local and CI build times and understand Build Cache misses and other typical Android build performance bottlenecks.
Identify, prioritize and fix flaky tests, including Android instrumentation test failures. Flaky test analytics helps you identify, determine the root cause, and facilitate flaky test debugging by leveraging trend data, filtering capabilities, and information about the devices executing the tests and their log files.
Use data to troubleshoot build failures. Failure Analytics helps teammates troubleshoot and debug builds, especially in remote working environments and for builds that have issues related to JDK and Android Studio differences.
Android Studio and Gradle
- Android Studio is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Google’s Android operating system, built on JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development.
- Android Studio supports the Gradle Build Tool as its default build system.
- Develocity has emerged as a popular build and test acceleration and failure analytics solution among many of the top global Android app brands.
- Develocity supports all major JVM ecosystem build systems, including Gradle Build Tool, Maven, and Bazel. This provides a single productivity solution strategy and platform across both mobile and backend (JVM) development teams.
Key Develocity Solution Capabilities for Android Build Systems
Key Develocity features that support the Android Studio build system include:
Build Cache. Build Cache speeds up local and CI builds by allowing you to share and reuse unchanged build and test outputs across the team. The task input comparison tool helps you understand why local devs and CI builds are not benefitting from the remote Build Cache to maximize Build Cache performance and reuse.
Performance Continuity. Performance Continuity refers to a rich set of analytic, profiling, and diagnostic tools to proactively sustain the feedback cycle time optimizations achieved with build caching. It includes critical path analysis to help focus performance improvements on the parts of the build that matter most.
Build Scan®. Build Scan gives Android developers detailed data for every command line, Android Studio or CI build, so they can quickly find the root cause of build and test failures and fix them on their own without re-running broken builds to reproduce problems.
To facilitate debugging, Android build data can be filtered by timeframe (e.g., show me only builds run in the last seven days); username (i.e., the operating system user that executed the build); the name of Gradle root project; build tool and version; custom values and tags; and the outcome of the running build.
Build Scan links can also be shared to allow remote debugging with teammates in remote working environments. With Develocity and Build Scan you can also easily compare builds and understand the differences that lead to the same build succeeding and then failing.
Failure Analytics. Failure Analytics complements Build Scan by improving build, test, and toolchain reliability with rich failure metrics and trend data for Android unit and instrumentation tests. You can use Failure analytics in combination with Build Scan to make problems like flaky tests and other avoidable failures easier to detect, reproduce for root cause analysis, and prioritize for fixing based on an impact assessment and frequency of occurrence.
Trends & Insights. While Develocity helps you react to tactical performance bottlenecks and daily failures, it also enables you to respond proactively to systemic problems and longer-term performance regressions using dashboards that make key metrics and KPIs more observable and actionable.
Get Started with an Android Build Scan
To get started with Android Build Scan, try our FREE service and run your first scan in 30 seconds with the quickstart sample project or follow the steps provided to use your own project. You can even extend each Build Scan with custom data. Learn how using the Develocity Gradle Plugin User Manual.