Gradle is a company known for its popular open-source build automation tool, Gradle Build Tool, and its commercial platform, Develocity, which focuses on Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). Pulse 2.0 interviewed Gradle co-founder and CEO Hans Dockter to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Hans Dockter’s Background
What is Hans Dockter’s background? Dockter said:
“Before founding Gradle, I spent many years as a developer and led numerous complex software projects for large organizations. In 2002, I started my career as a committer for the JBoss project and then founded the JBoss-IDE. From there, I spent multiple years as Senior Software Developer for Volkswagen and Krugle. This experience led me to start the open-source project, Gradle Build Tool, with Adam Murdoch in 2008. The success of the Gradle Build Tool project ultimately led to the development of Develocity, our platform for improving developer productivity, which we launched in 2017.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Dockter shared:
“The idea for Gradle was born out of my desire to address the toil and frustration developers deal with each day, building and testing their software. After years as a software engineer, I saw first-hand that the process is full of bottlenecks and unnecessary friction that ultimately take developers away from doing what they love: being creative and writing code. I felt passionate about improving the developer experience at scale, so I set out on a mission to transform the way organizations approach software engineering with tools and strategies that foster developer productivity and joy, while delivering strategic business outcomes like faster software delivery, better quality software, and lower development costs.”
“In addition to developing tools to help improve developer productivity, we’ve pioneered a new engineering philosophy called Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE). This philosophy views developer productivity as a technology challenge best addressed by engineered solutions rather than a people problem. As such, it focuses on engineering solutions that address the toil, frustrations, and process bottlenecks that most negatively impact the developer experience and are not addressed by even the most mature DevOps practices.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dockter explained:
“At Gradle, we offer two flagship products: Gradle Build Tool and Develocity. Gradle Build Tool is a modern open source build automation system known for its superior scalability and flexibility. It’s one of the most used build systems in the world—it’s the default build system for Google’s Android—and remains a top choice for Java and Kotlin developers as well.”
“Develocity is Gradle’s developer toolchain observability platform. It provides comprehensive observability, build and test acceleration technologies, and rapid troubleshooting features for Apache Maven, Bazel, sbt, npm, Python, and Gradle Build Tool. Key features include:
- Build Cache – Enables the reuse of unchanged build and test outputs to improve local and CI build performance
- Build Scan – Provides observability and one-of-a-kind trend dashboards that display everything going on in every build and test, helping developers diagnose and fix issues faster
- Predictive Test Selection – Leverages AI to identify the most relevant tests, reducing unnecessary test execution time during development
- Failure Analytics – Allows developers to proactively find unreliable builds and tests for prioritization and resolution
- Flaky Test Detection – Analyzes test retries and compares executions of tests across builds to surface insights about test flakiness
- Performance Insights – Automatically detects performance regressions and trends across builds, helping teams proactively identify and resolve inefficiencies before they impact developer productivity
- Reporting and Visualization – Provides in-depth analytics, dashboards, and reports that offer actionable insights into build and test performance, enabling teams to track progress, optimize workflows, and make data-driven decisions
- Toolchain Impact Analysis (upcoming) – A feature in development that allows technical (and security) teams to query the relationship between projects and their dependencies, helping to reduce risk by managing version spread and making it much faster to remediate a vulnerable component when one is discovered.
Develocity powers DPE initiatives by providing developers with actionable data and insights that help eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the build and test process. By enhancing visibility across the entire development pipeline, Develocity enables teams to identify and address issues faster, accelerate feedback cycles, and optimize performance. This allows developers to spend less time troubleshooting and more time focused on coding and innovation, ultimately driving better business outcomes through improved software quality and faster delivery.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Dockter and the team face in building teh company? Dockter acknowledged:
“Software development is an innately creative process. But, today’s developers are plagued with bottlenecks and inefficiencies that disrupt their creative flow and lead to burnout. Gradle helps address these challenges by providing developers the visibility needed to quickly identify and resolve build and test issues, streamlining the troubleshooting process. Develocity accelerates build and test feedback cycles, significantly reducing wait times, and enabling developers to stay in their flow state. By minimizing delays and offering clearer insights into system performance, Gradle empowers developers to focus on creating high-quality code and delivering results faster.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dockter affirmed:
“As the company pioneering the Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) movement, Gradle is disrupting how the software industry approaches developer productivity. While a traditional approach views developer productivity as a people problem that can be addressed by management techniques, DPE views developer productivity as a technology challenge. It focuses on engineering solutions that address the toil, frustrations, and process bottlenecks that most negatively impact the developer experience and are not addressed by even the most mature DevOps practices.”
“Additionally, compared to competitors, Develocity is the most comprehensive end-to-end solution with support for the broadest range of language and build ecosystems. It is the only multi-build system tool, supporting the most widely-used build systems in the Java ecosystem, including Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven, Bazel, and sbt. Most competitors only offer point solutions that overlap with a single capability of Develocity and that support only a specific build environment.”
“Lastly, Develocity powers a free Build Scan® service for developers with over 120 million reports generated so far. We also offer access to DPE University, a free training platform designed to help software developers and build engineers maximize their productivity.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dockter cited:
“We’ve achieved several significant milestones over the years that I’m proud of. For one, we’ve made tremendous progress in bringing Develocity support to more developer ecosystems and expanding our product offerings, including:
- Acquisition of Swiss-based software development technology provider, Triplequote
- Expansion of Develocity support for Apache Maven, Bazel, sbt, npm, and Python
- Collaboration with Red Hat to create a Develocity extension that accelerates Apache Maven builds in Quarkus
- Availability of Develocity on Google Cloud Marketplace
- Partnership with Github on an integration to improve developer experience and promote best security practices
Additionally, we’ve continued to be at the forefront of the DPE movement and made strides towards expanding the community, including:
- Hosted our annual Developer Productivity Engineering Summit for 3 years in a row
- Hosted a global event series, which facilitated discussions about high-impact strategies for improving developer productivity and that took place in major cities around the world, including New York, Boston, Washington D.C., London, Berlin, and more.
Lastly, Develocity won InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award (2x) and CODiE’s Most Innovative Tech Company, and was named a finalist for the 2024 Devies Awards, 2024 DevOps Dozen, and the 2024 DASA DevOps Award.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Dockter about customer success stories, he concluded:
“With over 230 active customers, Develocity is widely adopted by some of the most prestigious global brands, including Airbnb, Netflix, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Microsoft.”
“Netflix’s use of Develocity, in particular, provides a clear snapshot of the acceleration and productivity boost that’s possible with a solution like this. Prior to adopting Develocity, Netflix developers experienced a number of process bottlenecks and observability issues that inhibited productivity, including slow build and test cycles, long dependency download times, and unreliable toolchains. With a development environment averaging 2.4M builds and 14M tests monthly, the long build and test feedback cycles were the largest problem. After implementing Develocity, Netflix achieved a 50% reduction in build time and a 60% reduction in serial test execution time. Build times went from 10 minutes to just 1-2 minutes, ultimately saving their team 280,000+ developer hours per year.”
“We’ve also seen great success with Tableau, a leading analytics platform. Before adopting Develocity, Tableau’s engineering teams encountered inefficiencies in their build and test workflows, leading to longer iteration cycles and reduced productivity. With Develocity, Tableau achieved a 90% reduction in incremental build times, 30% faster full builds, significant improvements in test reliability, and streamlined troubleshooting thanks to insights from Build Scan.”
