Building JDK 11 Together

This article originally from Oracle's blog, written by Dalibor Topic 
All credits goes to original author

With the recent release of Java 11, it’s time to look back at the development of the second feature release in the new semi-annual release cadence. Let’s celebrate the many contributions in the OpenJDK Community from many individuals and organizations — we all built JDK 11, together!

JDK 11 Fix Ratio

The overall rate of change in the JDK over time has remained essentially constant for many years, but under the new cadence the rate at which changes are made available has increased dramatically. Instead of making tens of thousands of fixes and around one hundred JEPS available in a humongous release every few years, changes are made available in smaller releases on a more manageable, predictable schedule. These changes can range from large features to small enhancements to routine maintenance, bug fixes, and documentation improvements. Each such change is represented in a single commit for a single issue in the JDK Bug System.

Of the 2,468 JIRA issues marked as fixed in JDK 11, 1,963 were completed by people working for Oracle while 505 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations. Going through the issues and collating the organization data from assignees results in the following chart of organizations sponsoring the development of fixes in JDK 11:

While developers employed by Oracle resolved 80% of the JIRA issues during the development of JDK 11, 20% were fixed by developers working for other organizations. Developers working for the five next largest contributing organizations, SAP (7%), Red Hat (5%), Google (3%), BellSoft (1%) and IBM (1%), collectively fixed 17% of those issues. Independent developers contributed 2% of the fixes in JDK 11.

Last but not least, the remaining one percent of the fixes was collectively contributed by developers from a wide range of organizations including Alibaba, Amazon, ARM, Azul, Intel, JetBrains, Linaro and Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies.

But wait, there’s more

A lot more work goes into a JDK release in addition to the individual commits. There are JEPs, code reviews, bug reports and mailing list discussions, both in the JDK Project and the various OpenJDK Projects where features and fixes destined for JDK 11 originated. These include Project Valhalla and Project Amber, both led by Brian Goetz from Oracle, the AArch64 Port, led by Andrew Haley from Red Hat, and the ZGC Project, led by Per Lidén from Oracle.

With JDK 11 out of the door, the work on the first Oracle-led JDK 11 update in the JDK Updates Project’s repository has started, as well.

Thank you for JDK 11, everyone!

Finally, it’s time to say thank you to all developers who contributed code to JDK 11, and to their sponsoring organizations. Special thanks also to the many experienced developers who reviewed proposed changes, the early adopters who tried out early access builds and reported issues, and the patient professionals who provided feedback on the OpenJDK mailing lists.

How you can learn from this process...