[1138]

On limited information, this sounds like a work around on a root problem of runaway dependencies.

Maybe something like proguard could reduce deployable jar size to only the classes used.

I assume these are daily dev deploys and not production deploys.

[HiJon89]

We definitely have some dependency cruft that could be trimmed (lots of relocated copies of Guava due to incompatibilities, for example).

We do frequent production deploys (of individual services, there's no such thing as deploying our entire application). To give an idea, it's a little before 1pm here and across our team there have been 180 production deploys already today.