Develocity 2023.1: Deeper Insights, Advanced Search, and Enhanced Security

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Develocity 2023.1. The new release brings many compelling new features and capabilities, but here we highlight a few of the most impactful areas of innovation: deeper insights into artifact transformations, a new query language for advanced Build Scan™ searches, and enhancements to security including automated SCIM-based user management and custom roles for granular access control. Let’s dive into the details.

Deeper Insight into Artifact Transforms

One of the most requested areas of additional insight into the Gradle build process has been artifact transforms, and Develocity 2023.1 delivers significant new visibility into these critical build steps. Since artifact transformations run automatically to convert resolved dependencies into the required format, they can sometimes go unnoticed until a transformation fails or executes slowly. Designed specifically for those situations, the new inclusion of artifact transforms in the Build Scan™ timeline view sheds a much needed light on this previously dark area of the build process.

Because the transformed artifacts can be consumed as inputs to build tasks in complex ways, it’s possible for the entire build to succeed despite one or more artifact transforms failing. To help bring these issues to the surface, we are including failed artifact transforms in the Failures page of the Build Scan and on the Failures dashboard.

Artifact transforms will be an area of ongoing development for the Develocity engineering team. This release has focused on artifact transforms for project dependencies (not external libraries) which can be scheduled concurrently to other build tasks. Future releases will include additional detail around transform performance, cache effectiveness and other types of artifact transforms.

Advanced Build Scan Search & Query Language

As the number of data points captured in a Build Scan has grown over time, the Build Scan listing page has added more search fields to allow for quick faceted searches. With the Develocity 2023.1 release, we’re introducing a totally new way to construct and perform Build Scan searches: the advanced search query language.

Using a single text box, it’s now possible to write a search query that focuses on a very specific subset of Build Scans by leveraging boolean operators and field-specific search terms. It’s easy to switch between the basic and advanced search view with a single click and the query language syntax should be intuitive for anyone who’s done advanced searches in Google or JIRA. 

Enhanced Security: Custom Access Control Roles and Automated User Management

Develocity admins now have access to create their own custom role-based access control (RBAC) roles and assign them to users. This has been a hotly requested feature in larger organizations who need more granular control over user permissions. Custom roles can also be integrated with an external identity provider using LDAP or SAML.

The 2023.1 release also introduces support for the System for Cross-domain Identity Management protocol (SCIM). This allows external identity providers such as Okta to proactively notify service provider applications, such as Develocity, when a user’s role or group membership properties have changed. This automation improves the security posture of Develocity because user policy changes take effect closer to real time, instead of waiting for the next time the user logs in.

Future Directions

With the 2023.1 release out the door, the Develocity engineering team is already looking ahead to our next milestone and, as always, greatly values input from customers and prospects to shape the direction of our development roadmap. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team via our community Slack workspace to share any feedback on 2023.1 features or ideas for future development. 

To learn more about this release check out the release notes.