February 2026

Welcome to the February 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, we’re exploring the frontiers of build performance, from community experiments in reinforcement learning to test reports right in your IDE. Plus a sneak peek at Gradle 9.4.0.

From the Community

New posts

Modernizing Kafka Webinar

Modernizing Apache Kafka’s CI webinar

Ever wonder how a massive project like Apache Kafka keeps its builds fast and reliable?

On March 12, join Apache Kafka PMC David Arthur to see how Kafka modernized its CI pipeline using Develocity and GitHub Actions. Learn how they tackled flaky tests, optimized build times, and improved developer productivity at scale.

👉 Register today

From Gradle

Gradle 9.4.0

Gradle 9.4.0 release candidate

The first release candidate for Gradle 9.4 is officially live! This update is all about better visibility—both on the console and in your test reports—while keeping you on the bleeding edge of the ecosystem with early Java 26 support.

Give it a test drive: Update your wrapper now to help us polish the final release: ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=9.4.0-rc-1

👉 Release notes

From Develocity

Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.2

Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.2

Stop jumping between your IDE and Develocity to investigate failures. The Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.2 brings “Test History” directly to your code:

AI-Powered Troubleshooting

🚀 AI-Powered Troubleshooting: Check out our latest blog post from Java Champion Trisha Gee. Learn how the plugin integrates with AI agents to answer questions like “Why did this fail in CI but not locally?” by analyzing Develocity data directly in your editor.

👉 Read more

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).

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The Call for Proposals for the March edition is now open!

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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