Saving 5,400 Hours a Year: Developer Productivity with Gradle
Article Summary
Paul Hundal from Square's Mobile Developer Experience team reveals how one Gradle feature saved their Android team the equivalent of watching 60 football games worth of waiting time. The ROI? $1.1 million annually.
Square's Android codebase spans 4 million lines across 4,000+ modules, with 200 developers collectively spending 182 hours per week waiting for local builds. The MDX Android team tackled this productivity drain by implementing Gradle's Configuration Cache, a feature that reuses task graph computations instead of rebuilding them from scratch every time.
Key Takeaways
- Build times dropped from 136 seconds to 74 seconds (183% improvement)
- Failed builds now fail 300% faster, accelerating debugging cycles
- Annual savings: 5,400 developer hours worth $1.1 million in productivity
- Weekly team build time plummeted from 182 hours to just 25 hours
Critical Insight
Enabling Gradle's Configuration Cache cut Square's Android build times by more than half, recovering over 5,400 hours of developer productivity annually.
