How AndroidX Does Developer Productivity Engineering with Develocity

Overview

The Google AndroidX team recently set up Develocity to gain greater insights into their build and test process that will make developers running those builds more productive. This effort was a means to foster more community engagement, and to help external developers who contribute to their complex open-source projects be more productive. In this webcast, we chat with Aurimas Liutikas, a staff software engineer on the Google Android SDK team working on the AndroidX project.

AndroidX is a collection of open-source libraries geared towards Android app developers to make their lives easier. AndroidX has replaced the original Android Support Libraries and is used to develop, test, and package, version, and release libraries within Jetpack.

Speaker

Topics of Discussion

How the AndroidX team:

• Runs builds and tests for all their projects and how they enable external developers to contribute to AndroidX (github vs aosp).
• Leveraged –scan with public Gradle servers and Gradle Remote Cache Node to get free wins before deploying Develocity.
• Set up Develocity and publishes from Github Actions.
• Integrates a Github Actions workflow with Develocity.
• Set up the AndroidX Develocity plugin to publish a Build Scan for all local builds and CI jobs. 
• Set up “tags” to filter aggregated reports using common-custom-user-data-gradle-plugin.
• Runs experiments to identify and debug cache misses in Github Actions.
• Identifies and fixes dependency download issues that slow down builds.
• Finds tasks missing caches due to absolute path usage in task inputs.
• Observes what developers are spending time on.