Session: Developer Productivity Engineering with Gradle
In 2007, Hans Dockter invented the Gradle Build Tool because he felt that developers deserved less friction in their toolchain. The prevailing build technologies of the time were adequate but inefficient, not taking advantage of possible acceleration technologies and, with some exceptions, very limited in their language and framework support. Gradle is now one of the most widely used build tools available, downloaded about 25 million times a month as of September of 2021. It’s the default build tool in Android Studio, and is trusted by millions of developers to create their artifacts quickly and cleanly.
The principles that originally guided the Gradle build tool towards its current popularity have continued into an emerging practice known as Developer Productivity Engineering or DPE. DPE is a new software development practice that uses acceleration technologies to speed up the software build and test process and data analytics to optimize the impact of acceleration technologies and make troubleshooting more efficient. Leading technology companies are using this practice today to accelerate feedback cycles by over 90% in some cases, improving the developer experience and increasing team velocity.
Join Sterling Greene, Lead Software Engineer for the Gradle Build Tool, and Justin Reock, Field CTO of Gradle Enterprise, to learn why DPE is swiftly becoming the most important movement in software development since the introduction of DevOps.
Attendees will walk away from this presentation with a better understanding of:
- The importance of fast feedback cycles and how to achieve them using build and test acceleration technologies
- Using build and test data to make troubleshooting and problem root cause determination more efficient.
- The importance of leveraging failure analytics to improve toolchain reliability, including managing avoidable failures like flaky tests.
- How to continuously improve performance and guard against regressions through trend and metric observability.
- The Cost of Inaction (CoI) by not investing in developer productivity across your local build environments and CI/CD pipelines in terms of engineering cost, TTM and software quality.
- How to elevate the strategic priority of DPE in your organization.
