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DevOps / Gradle8 Interview Questions

What is the purpose of Gradle in a build process?

Gradle's purpose is to automate everything between "source code exists" and "a tested, packaged artifact exists" — compiling code, resolving and downloading dependencies, running tests, packaging jars/apks, and optionally publishing the result to a repository, all driven by a declarative build script rather than a hand-run sequence of commands.

What sets its purpose apart from a simple task runner is incrementality: Gradle models the whole build as a graph of tasks with declared inputs and outputs, and re-executes only the tasks whose inputs actually changed since the last run. Combined with local and remote build caching, this means a large project's rebuild after a small change can take seconds instead of minutes, which is the main reason large multi-module codebases standardize on it over simpler build scripts.

What core capability lets Gradle avoid rebuilding a project from scratch every time?
Besides compiling and testing, what else can a Gradle build do with the final artifact?

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