[chriswarbo]

> Any idea if there is a project to try to improve things with maven or with another JVM tool? (Grade, sbt, etc.)

We've found SBT to be less reproducible than Maven. In particular, its "configuration file" (build.sbt) is actually executable Scala code (and highly imperative too, e.g. appending to mutable dependency lists). I've seen projects which choose different dependencies based on env var settings, string matches, etc.

I've also seen projects which add pre/post steps to a test suite, for spinning-up and tearing-down a mock database (the dynamodb-local SBT plugin). The crazy part about that, is that SBT only becomes aware of the plugin when it's about to execute the test suite; hence it doesn't appear in any dependency lists, so we can't automatically fetch it ahead-of-time. By the way, that plugin itself works by downloading and running a "latest.zip" file from an AWS URL....