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DevOps / Gradle8 Interview Questions

What are Gradle build scans?

A build scan is a shareable, web-hosted report of a single build invocation — every task that ran, how long each took, what was up-to-date versus rebuilt, dependency resolution details, warnings, and the full console output, all in a browsable format rather than scrollback text.

./gradlew build --scan

Running with --scan uploads the report to Gradle's Develocity service (with a confirmation prompt on first use) and returns a unique URL. Its practical value shows up most in debugging: instead of pasting raw console logs into a chat message to ask "why did this task rerun" or "why is this build slow," sharing the scan link gives a teammate the same interactive, filterable view of exactly what happened, including a visual timeline of task execution and caching behavior.

What does the --scan flag produce?
What practical debugging problem do build scans help solve?

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