October 2025
Table of Contents
New posts
- Shrinking Elephants – Tony Robalik and Josh Friend detail how they cut IntelliJ/Gradle syncs in a giant Kotlin monorepo from minutes to ~15s.
- Input to Your Inputs: What Invalidates Gradle Configuration Cache? – Aurimas Liutikas explores how Gradle determines task inputs behind the scenes and explains the mechanics of task dependency inference to help you write more accurate and cache-friendly builds.
- Develocity IntelliJ Plugin: Speed Up Gradle Builds with Local Insights – The Gradle team introduces an IntelliJ plugin that surfaces build performance insights (e.g., slow tasks, cache misses, and configuration issues) directly in the IDE and offers guided fixes so you can speed up Gradle builds without leaving your editor. Don’t miss the webinar.
- Gradle Version Checking – Aurimas Liutikas shows how to fail fast when the wrong Gradle version is used, align IDE and CI, and roll out repo-wide guards to reduce “works on my machine” drift and support smooth upgrades.
- How to Configure Gradle: The Ultimate Guide – Serhii Hryshyn walks through advanced Gradle configuration techniques, covering topics such as buildscript blocks, plugin management, dependency resolution strategies, and performance optimizations.
- Android Optimized R8 – Sergio De Simone covers enhancements to R8 that focus on Android optimization, detailing how the updated code shrinker improves performance and reduces APK size.
New videos
- Carefree Dependency Management in Java Projects (8-part video series) – A hands-on series from Jendrik Johannes at javarca.de on keeping Gradle/Maven builds stable without fuss.
- Integrating Kotlin Code into the Gradle Build Process – This talk by Michael Ehrmann at droidcon Berlin 2025 shows how to weave Kotlin code seamlessly into the Gradle build pipeline, covering best practices, plugin usage, and tips for maintaining cohesive build logic.
New releases
- JRuby Gradle Plugin 2.2.0 has a major new feature, making alternative gem sources much easier to adopt.
- Asciidoctor Gradle Plugin 5.0.0-alpha.1 marks the beginning of the next major version of the plugin. This release introduces important updates and lays the groundwork for future improvements.
- CycloneDX Gradle Plugin 3.0.1 has been updated to Gradle 9. This plugin produces a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) covering both direct and transitive project dependencies.
- OpenRewrite Gradle Plugin 7.18.0 helps automate technical debt elimination and code transformation via rewrite rules. This latest release includes best practices!
From the Gradle team
Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2
If you’re not already publishing a Build Scan® whenever you build your Gradle projects, now is the perfect time to try. The Develocity Gradle Plugin (formerly the Build Scan plugin) makes it effortless, and our Build Scan service is completely free to use.
A Build Scan gives you instant visibility into how your build behaves by showing detailed performance breakdowns, dependency resolution insights, test results with stack traces, and more. In case of multiple failures, the Build Scan will group failures with the same reason together to streamline the troubleshooting experience.
For example, the Build Scan below quickly reveals which direct dependency (minio) pulled in a vulnerable transitive dependency (bouncycastle). Just two clicks to the answer:
Here, Build Scan finds that 40 failures boil down to 4 root-cause groups:
Because each Build Scan is a simple shareable URL, troubleshooting with teammates becomes dramatically easier. To learn more, visit our Build Scan page.
The latest release, Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2, is now available.
👉 Ready to try it? Add the Develocity Gradle Plugin to your build.
Develocity MCP server for Agentic AI
The Develocity Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI agents with access to Develocity data, enabling developers and build engineers to effectively troubleshoot build failures, build reliability issues, and performance concerns with their preferred AI assistant.
For instance, one can set up Copilot to use the MCP server and use the following prompts:
- “Why did my last build fail?”
- “Which tests are the flakiest this week in CI?”
- “What changed between builds X and Y?”
- “Why is build X slow?”
In the screenshot below, the agent used the Develocity MCP Server to understand the root cause of the build failure and suggest fixes.
👉 Interested in our Limited Availability? Contact us.
Develocity Artifact Cache
Ephemeral CI builds are a de facto industry standard in modern development. This crucial shift, however, comes with its own set of challenges:
- Redundant work because every build starts from scratch,
- Instabilities coming from consuming services like dependency or toolchain repositories, and
- Escalating data transfer costs from repeatedly downloading the same artifacts.
We’re tackling this directly with our newest product: Develocity Artifact Cache is a powerful new caching layer designed to turbocharge your CI builds and pipelines.
The Artifact Cache is a distributed, highly available, high-throughput solution that seamlessly complements your existing Build Cache. While the Build Cache speeds up task execution by caching build outputs, the Artifact Cache caches build inputs like dependencies, toolchains, wrappers, and Gradle configuration.
Early pilots show significant gains from dependency caching alone, with up to 40% in build time savings.
Watch this presentation from DPE Summit 2025 to learn more.
👉 Interested in joining our early access program? Contact us.
Develocity Provenance Governor preview
Remember Log4Shell? The painful scramble wasn’t just about a bad library; it was about not knowing where risky artifacts came from and where they were being used throughout your software development lifecycle. With software supply-chain attacks on the rise, our product, Develocity Provenance Governor, makes that kind of incident far easier to identify and resolve. Most importantly, you can prove it.
Using deep provenance data from Develocity Build Scan®, Provenance Governor continuously evaluates every artifact across local and CI builds and blocks unverified toolchain inputs before they reach production. It gives CISOs and DevSecOps a practical, shift-left approach to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) with clear provenance, policy enforcement, and auditable decisions. It enables your organization to practice continuous GRC through automation.
Provenance Governor seamlessly integrates with partner ecosystems, starting with JFrog AppTrust, so it fits alongside your existing registries and pipelines.
👉 Interested in how we can help protect your organization? Contact us.
DPE Summit 2025
We recently wrapped up DPE Summit 2025, our flagship event dedicated entirely to Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) and Developer Experience (DX).
If you couldn’t attend, no worries! We’re publishing most of the session recordings online. Check out a few of our favorite talks on AI:
- Nachiappan Nagappan, Meta - Measuring the Impact of AI on Developer Productivity at Meta
- Vic Iglesias, Netflix - Developer Productivity in the Age of GenAI
- Szczepan Faber and Mike Nakhimovich, Airbnb - Agentic coding at Airbnb
- Abi Noda, DX, and Nicole Forsgren - Developer Experience in the AI Era
- Venkad Dhandapani, Salesforce - Salesforce’s AI Journey for Developer Productivity: From Single Tool to Multi-Agent Development Ecosystem
👉 Explore all the videos here. More coming soon!
Upcoming events
Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE).
- October 28-30, GitHub Universe - GitHub’s two-day developer event celebrating innovation. Laura and Tom will discuss the new Dependency Graph for Gradle feature.
- October 30-31, droidcon London - The #1 conference for all things Android. Stop by our booth and meet Louis from the Gradle Build Tool team and Android experts from the Develocity team!
Spread the word
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You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.
The Call for Proposals for the November edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!
If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue,
let us know using the #community-news channel on the Gradle Community Slack or by mentioning @Gradle on Twitter/X.
Until next time!
— The Gradle Team
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