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Netflix

Develocity saves Netflix 280,000+ hours per year with faster builds and tests

The problem

Slow builds and tests plus low confidence in test suites

  • Slow builds and tests and long dependency download times had an increasingly negative impact on development team productivity and efficiency.
  • The number of unreliable and flaky tests was increasing and wasting CI compute costs.
  • Lack of confidence in test suites was creating cultural challenges and encouraging developer behaviors that only exacerbated the problem.
For one project we reduced the build time from 62 minutes to 5 minutes just using Test Distribution across multiple machines. Launching all those tests from IntelliJ, and have it delegate to Develocity and watch the parallel results just stream while your CPU is barely affected... it’s just really something.
Danny Thomas
Developer Productivity / JVM Ecosystem
Enabling Predictive Test Selection has saved us a lot of wasted time testing unmodified code. Along with Test Distribution, it reduced our test execution times a full order of magnitude. These coupled with Build Cache have brought our average build times from >10 minutes to 1-2 minutes.
Aubrey Chipman
Developer Productivity / Senior Engineer

The solution

Accelerated testing and increased observability for test failures

  1. 1
    Build Cache to reduce build times by enabling the reuse of unchanged build and test outputs that are unaffected by new code.
  2. 2
    Build Scan® to provide observability and comprehensive reports on all aspects of builds to decrease troubleshooting time and MTTR.
  3. 3
    Predictive Test Selection to only run tests that deliver meaningful results and Test Distribution to accelerate testing through modern parallelism.
  4. 4
    Test Failure Analytics to proactively find unreliable builds and flaky tests for prioritization and resolution.

The outcome

Transformative gains in developer productivity and experience

  • 50% reduction in total build time, 60% reduction in serial test execution time, and 250,000 hours saved per year on CI and local builds.
  • Developers are empowered to run more builds and tests more frequently.
  • Consistent performance experience between local and CI.
  • Decreased CI compute usage and cost and reduction in CI agent failures due to misconfigured Test Suites.
  • Features released faster and more frequently, transformative team productivity gains, and significant improvements to the developer experience.
  • See Netflix's DPE Summit presentation video for the full story.

Customer stories