# How the Gradle Team Adopted Isolated Projects

DevFeed: [How the Gradle Team Adopted Isolated Projects](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-the-gradle-team-adopted-isolated-projects-24658.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.gradle.org/isolated-projects-in-gradle-team>)

Author: Alex Semin

Published: 2026-07-22T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Gradle Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-gradle-blog.md>)

Topics: [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>), [Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scalability.md>), [Cache](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cache.md>), [configuration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/configuration.md>), [Dependency management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/dependency-management.md>), [ci](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ci.md>), [ide](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ide.md>)

Tags: [cache](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cache.md>), [ci](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci.md>), [configuration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/configuration.md>), [dependency-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dependency-management.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [ide](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ide.md>), [parallelism](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/parallelism.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>)

## AI overview

The Gradle team describes adopting the experimental Isolated Projects feature in its own build. The article explains that Isolated Projects runs project configuration in parallel to improve scalability and performance, and outlines migration prerequisites, diagnostics, convention plugins, dependency management, and Shared Build Services.

## Source excerpt

Isolated Projects is an experimental feature aimed at improving Gradle scalability and performance. It speeds up builds by running project configuration in parallel, which benefits practically every workflow, from CI builds to IDE sync. We want the feature to offer an excellent user experience, so we made it a goal to adopt Isolated Projects in our own build, even though it is still in active development. This lets us find and smooth out the rough spots early, though secretly, we were also looking forward to the productivity boost for our own team. With Isolated Projects, more build logic runs concurrently. To keep builds reliable under that parallelism, the feature introduces additional constraints, and adopting it means migrating your build to address the violations of those constraints. Migrating our build Isolated Projects builds directly on top of the Configuration Cache, so making the build Configuration Cache compatible is a prerequisite. Fortunately for us, we've been enjoying fast inner developer loops for many years now, so that box was already checked. The general approach to migrating against new constraints is to start with the simplest workflows, such as running the help task, and address the violations. Then proceed to more complex workflows, such as IDE sync or CI. Running in Diagnostics mode helps you see all violations at once in a single HTML report, and the guide describes the recommended migration path. For the Gradle build, we followed a similar path. What helped us the most and made the migration much smoother is following the best practices, especially the best practice of having convention plugins: each project applies the build logic it needs, and no project has to reach in and mutate another's state directly. We've leaned heavily on sharing artifacts between projects only via dependency management, which is inherently compatible with Isolated Projects by making each project define its "outputs", on which other projects can depend. For more