Stakeholders

Introduction

Gradle has an impact on a variety of groups/people. Their concerns and expectations mold Gradle's architecture. This section enumerates the important stakeholders and describes who they are.

We also provide information denoting each stakeholder's power over Gradle's architecture and their interest with regards to Gradle's development.

Power-Interest Matrix

In order to visualize and quickly prioritize which stakeholder's concerns are most important, a Power-Interest Matrix is attached.

Stakeholder List

The below list is ordered in a descending order of which stakeholders we determine to be of the highest priority to Gradle.

Stakeholder
Gradle Developers
Plugin Developers
Business Managers
Project Developers
Gradle Documentors
Open Source Maintainers
IDE Developers
Development Tool Developers

Note

_{[1] Google is not specifically mentioned in the stakeholders document there are too many companies that use Gradle, we cannot enumerate all of them. Companies would also be Project Developers, Plugin Developers, etc... We kept the document more general, void of details such that it is both clear and concise.}

Gradle Developers

Type: Developers, Maintainers, Assessors

(Power,Interest): (High, High)

Description

Gradle Developers are people who contribute to the Gradle project on GitHub. These can be either from the community or hired by Gradle Inc.

Evidence

The project must be developed by devs and prominent ones can be found on the GitHub page. The project is also working towards earning an OpenSSF badge which is self assessed.

Plugin Developers

Type: Maintainers

(Power/Interest): (High, Medium)

Description

These developers contribute to the functionality of Gradle, not by directly contributing to the porject but isntead by creating Plugins that expand the types of tasks that Gradle can run.

Evidence

Plugins are critical to the functioning of Gradle as critical functions are found in plugins including the ability to compile Java Projects. Gradle also supports a large number of plugins.

Business Managers

Type: Acquirers

(Power/Interest): (Very High, Low)

Description

Business Managers are peope who manage teams of software development teams. These stakeholders may look to adopting Gradle as a build tool for their teams to streamline builds.

Evidence

Gradle improves over other build tools in many aspects, notably performance. Gradle is also licensed under the Apache 2.0 License which allows the software to be used for free commercially. Business Managers are obviously of high importance since Gradle, Inc also develops and distributes an Enterprise version of Gradle with additional features.

Project Developers

Type: Users

(Power/Interest): (Medium - High, Low - High)

Description

Project developers are the users of Gradle. They use Gradle in order to streamline the building of software projects.

Evidence

The Gradle readme file quickly describes the benefits for developers to use Gradle "to support build automation". In addition the Kotlin website suggests and gives instruction on how to build Kotlin projects using Gradle.

Gradle Documentors

Type: Communicators

(Power/Interest): (Medium, High)

Description

Gradle Documentors are responsible for documenting the use of Gradle and providing tutorials on how the tool can be used. They act as a connection between Gradle devlopers and users of Gradle

Evidence

Gradle has robust documentation that has information the majority of Gradle's functionality.

Open Source Maintainers

Type: System administrators

(Power/Interest): (Medium, High)

Description

These stakeholders are those that oversee and manage open source projects. These stakeholders may have a special interest in Gradle as a way to ensure that the project builds and operates uniformly for all contributers and users that pull from the repository.

Evidence

Gradle's main purpose is that of a build tool. Build tools are "A necessary precondition for continuous integration and continuous testing" which are crucial to Open Source development. Gradle is used in hundreds of large Open Source projects such as WorldEdit, the Kotlin Language, Android Ground, and FDroid.

IDE Developers

Type: Production Engineers

(Power/Interest): (Low, Medium)

Description

IDE developers create IDEs and may be interested in integrating Gradle as a build tool in their tools.

Evidence

Gradle advertises that Gradle is supported in many popular IDEs as seen on their website. IDEs also advertise their functionality with Gradle (Eclipse website).

Development Tool Developers

Type: Users

(Power/Interest): (Low, High)

Description

These stakeholders build products using Gradle as their framework.

Evidence

Several development tools outline methods to deploy their tools through using Gradle. Examples include Flyway, Quarkus, and Project Lombok.