Leading software development companies are now deploying software multiple times per day. In this sort of environment, even small periods of waiting can add up to significant disruptions. One of the bottlenecks we have heard from our customers lately is with their builds. If you are deploying your software multiple times per day, you are a building your software multiple times per day, the faster you build, the faster you can deploy your software. We recently reduced one of our clients build times by almost 70% using parallel builds and modularity, which allowed them to release their software faster.
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How Do Parallel Builds Work?
Many popular tools support parallel builds including JFrog’s Conan, Maven, Gradle, and MSBuild. This allows you to utilize the full power of your hardware. Parallel builds analyses your project's dependencies and builds the modules in parallel based on the inter-module dependencies. According to Maven, your build performance can improve 20-50% by implementing parallel builds, but performance depends greatly on your software architecture (or how modular your software is). Below is an example representation of a software application’s dependencies. Each letter in the graph represents a module in the code.