Developer Productivity Engineering Newsletter

DPE Newsletter | Aug-2023

BEST PRACTICES

Important things to know about flaky tests, build rot, and remote work’s impact on local build times

Here are recent DPE best practice blogs, written by DPE Advocates on the Gradle team:

Seven Reasons You Should Not Ignore Flaky Tests (by Trisha Gee) - This article explains why you should care about flaky tests, along with steps you can take to better diagnose failures and increase your team’s confidence in test signals.
Build Rot: The Hidden Technical Debt in Maven and Gradle Builds (by Brian Demers) - This post surfaces the most common sources of build rot—the technical debt accumulating in your build—and describes how to deploy DPE practices to address these pains.
Revving Up Remote Work: A Closer Look at Local Build Times (by Baruch Sadogursky) - This article reveals how remote work can impact local build times (a critical performance indicator) and why we should put our local build times under the microscope.

EXPERT TAKES

Watch the first installment of short video interviews with DPE leaders: ‘DPE Expert DoubleShots’

Round up your ristretto! This quick, yet rich DoubleShot of DPE may stimulate your mind with insights and advice from DPE thought leaders:

Simona Bateman (5-min) - Bateman explains how FitBit, after being acquired by Google, benefits from a dedicated DPE team when dealing with challenges like flaky tests, inefficiencies with local development, and handling a monorepo at scale.
Adam Rogal (4-min) - Rogal describes how DoorDash benefits from DPE practices, including establishing an internal developer portal to simplify and speed up access to developer productivity tooling, better utilizing build cache across their application landscape, and enabling smoother collaboration between teams.

Reminder: DPE Summit 2023 will take place Sep 20-21 in San Francisco. This year, JetBrains, Meta, Netflix, and Uber are both sponsoring and speaking—view the complete speaker lineup, learn more about the event, and register today.

Go to dpesummit.com

IDEAS & INSIGHTS

MIT Technology Review - Building a world-class platform for software engineers at JPMorgan Chase

This article from MIT and JPMorgan Chase reiterates the power of DPE as a fast-emerging trend in the world of software, focusing on JPMC's shift toward minimizing the cognitive load for engineers and proliferating their productivity practices.

Read why JPMC has chosen to focus on specific strategic imperatives like providing developers with a unified, self-service interface, taking a cloud-first and data-driven approach, and providing the capability to quickly detect and recover from failures.

Read the article

INDUSTRY NEWS

Gradle Enterprise expands build system footprint support to Bazel and sbt communities, plus wins award for innovation

Gradle Inc. has released Gradle Enterprise 2023.2, which for Bazel users provides general availability support for core Gradle Enterprise capabilities, including Build Scan®, Build Cache, and Build Failure Analytics. Gradle also shared that it has joined the Bazel Products Partner program. The new release also provides a beta version of Gradle Enterprise Build Scan for sbt builds, which developers can test-drive at scans.gradle.com.

Also in July, Gradle was named the Most Innovative Tech Company of 2023 as part of the 38th annual Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Awards.

Catch up on Gradle news