The document discusses improving the build and release process for a monolith Java application from taking half a day down to half an hour by moving from Maven to Gradle. It outlines the challenges with the previous Maven build process that took 2.5 to 5 hours to complete full builds and releases. The new process with Gradle enables incremental and parallel compiling, deploy scripts in Groovy, unit testing build scripts, and producing release versions in under 30 minutes with snapshots for faster iterations. Jenkins is configured with Gradle plugins to automate the build, test, release and deployment pipeline.