X-Ray your Build: Build Events, Build Scans, and Caching Explained
summary
Sbt emits task and test events via listeners and execution traces that reveal thread-level bottlenecks and task durations; observed test execution takes about 80% test time of large builds and flaky tests cause repeated CI retries. Sbt’s current caching only covers compilation and requires a push/pull compile cache workflow, while the Gradle Enterprise build scans store, visualize and let teams query events and flakiness, and an Sbt 2.0 RFC proposes extensible, cross-task remote caching.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction to build observability
- 1:51Developer productivity in builds
- 3:17Slow builds impact timelines
- 5:47What happens during builds
- 7:10Build analysis essential data
- 8:35Debugging CI failures with diffs
- 10:21Flaky builds consequences
- 12:12Slow build time contributors
- 13:19Test execution dominates time
- 14:46Fixing flaky and slow tests
- 17:37SBT task execution engine
- 18:41Visualizing SBT build traces
- 20:27SBT observability limits
- 21:55Capturing build events
- 22:17Build caching speeds builds
- 23:43SBT caching capabilities
- 25:48Future of SBT caching
- 26:53Conclusion and next steps
