See [Architecture decisions records](standards) for the list of ADRs.
Be aware these are very technical descriptions of the decisions, and you might find the documentation below more useful as an introduction to the internals of Gradle.

## Platform architecture

Gradle is arranged into several coarse-grained components called "platforms".

The build tree state is managed by the `BuildTreeState` class.
An instance is created at the start of a build execution and discarded at the end of the execution.

### Build state

The "build state" holds the state for a build within the build definition for a single build execution, and is contained by the build tree state.

The build state is managed by the `BuildState` class.

* maximize the chance of your changes being accepted
* work on the Gradle code base
* get help if you encounter trouble

## Before you start

Before starting to work on a feature or a bug fix, please open an issue to discuss the use case or bug with us. This can save everyone a lot of time and frustration.

For any non-trivial change, we need to be able to answer these questions:

* Why is this change done? What's the use case?

This is a general-purpose automation platform which takes care of the efficient definition and execution of work, such as tasks.
This platform is agnostic to what exactly the purpose of the work is.
It might be creating an application, setting up development environments, orchestrating deployments, running simulations, etc.

This platform does not provide special support for a particular kind of automation. This is the responsibility of other platforms.

 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */