The Benefits of Build Automation for Your Project
What is Build automation?
Build automation is the process of automating the retrieval of source code, compiling it into binary code, executing automated tests, and publishing it into a shared, centralized repository. Build automation is critical to successful DevOps processes.
What is a Build Tool?
Build tools are software that helps to automate the process of application creation. Build processes incorporate compiling, linking, and packaging code into executable forms.
Build automation is a critical first step of any CI/CD process; you must have build automation in place for Continuous Integration (CI) to occur. And CI is one of seven DevOps practices you need to be successful. That’s why build automation is so important in DevOps.
While each company uses different solutions in their automated process support, the general idea of build automation is the same across the board: A centralized system handles most steps of the build process, distributing the final package once a build has finished. There are various degrees of build automation, and a team doesn’t necessarily have to automate every single process step.
5 Benefits of Build Automation
Increased Productivity
Build automation ensures fast feedback. This means your developers increase productivity. They’ll spend less time dealing with tools and processes — and more time delivering value.
Accelerated Delivery
Build automation helps you accelerate delivery. That’s because it eliminates redundant tasks and ensures you find issues faster, so you can release software faster.
Improved Quality
Build automation helps your team move faster. That means you’ll be able to find issues faster and resolve them to improve the overall quality of your product — and avoid bad builds.
Maintains a Complete History
Build automation maintains a complete history of files and changes. That means you’ll be able to track issues back to their source.
It Saves Time and Money
Build automation saves time and money. That’s because build automation sets you up for CI/CD, increases productivity, accelerates delivery, and improves quality.
Build automation tools
There are different tools for archive automation, like Gradle, Maven, Ant, Jenkins, etc. In this article, we’ll learn more about Gradle.
What is Gradle
Gradle is an open-source build tool that combines the best features of Apache Ant and Apache Maven. It is written in various JVM-based languages, including Java, Groovy, and Kotlin, and is highly flexible and powerful. Many tech giants, such as Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Elastic, have used Gradle as a build tool for their projects, and it is consistently ranked among the top 20 open-source projects.
Gradle vs. Maven
There are some fundamental differences in how the two systems approach builds. Gradle is based on a graph of task dependencies, while Maven is based on a fixed and linear model of phases. With Maven, goals are attached to project phases, and goals serve a similar function to Gradle’s tasks, being the “things that do the work.”
Performance-wise, both allow for multi-module builds to run in parallel. However, Gradle allows for incremental builds because it checks which tasks are updated or not. If it is, the task is not executed, giving you a much shorter build time. Other distinguishing performance features you can find on Gradle include:
- Incremental compilations for Java classes
- Compile avoidance for Java
- The use of APIs for incremental subtasks
- A compiler daemon that also makes compiling a lot faster
Regarding managing dependencies, both Gradle and Maven can handle dynamic and transitive dependencies, use third-party dependency caches, and read the POM metadata format. You can also declare library versions via central versioning definition and enforce central versioning. Both download transitive dependencies from their artifact repositories. Maven has Maven Central, while Gradle has JCenter, and you can also define private repositories. If there are several dependencies required, Maven can download these simultaneously.
Gradle, however, excels in handling API and implementation dependencies and allows for concurrent, safe cache usage. It maintains repository metadata and cached dependencies, preventing projects that use the same cache from overwriting one another. Gradle also utilizes a checksum-based cache to ensure that the cache is synchronized with the repository.
Why did Google choose Gradle for android?
Google seeks to streamline the app development process and found Gradle to be the fastest and most flexible option. As a result, Google has adopted Gradle for its Android operating system, which holds a 70% market share. There are three main reasons why Google chose Gradle:
- Performance
- Flexibility
- User Experience
Performance
Gradle is nearly twice fast as Maven in all scenarios and 100x faster for large builds using the build cache.
Flexibility
Google choose Gradle not just because it is far faster than others. But the Gradle is also very flexible. Gradle’s model is designed so that it can be expanded to cover any ecosystem.
User Experience
To provide a better user experience, Gradle supports a wide range of IDEs. Although IDEs are important, many users still like to work with the terminal. That’s why Gradle provides modern CLI. Gradle also provides build scans interactive web-based UI for debugging and optimizing builds.
Conclusion
Can a software development team work without a build automation system? Absolutely. But at some point, any potential growth opportunities for that team will be bottlenecked by its DevOps capacity. A comprehensive build automation solution is the best way to avoid any problems.
