Case Study: Salesforce cuts Android build times from 20 minutes to under 4 minutes with Gradle Develocity

Salesforce cuts Android build time from 20 minutes to under 4 with Gradle

Salesforce, a major technology company, faced significant challenges with its Android build times, which had stretched to over 20 minutes. This slow feedback cycle was disruptive to developer productivity and prompted the formation of a dedicated mobile build engineering team. To address this, Salesforce partnered with Gradle and implemented its Develocity platform to gain deep visibility into build performance and identify optimization opportunities.

Gradle's solution centered on enabling and optimizing the build cache, a feature of Gradle that allows outputs from previous builds to be reused. By leveraging Develocity's build scans to analyze and debug their process, Salesforce successfully configured a remote build cache shared between CI and developers. This implementation, along with enabling parallel execution and updating plugins, reduced their Android build time from 20 minutes to under 4 minutes. The results were transformative, saving the equivalent of days of build time each week and significantly improving developer productivity and satisfaction.

Salesforce