Migrating a project from Maven to Gradle means translating pom.xml's declarative dependency and plugin configuration into Gradle's script-based build.gradle, while preserving the same build behavior. The main challenges are mapping build lifecycle phases and plugin equivalents correctly rather than just syntax translation.
Key Points: • Run gradle init inside the Maven project — it can automatically generate an initial build.gradle from the existing pom.xml as a starting point. • Manually verify dependency scopes translate correctly (Maven's compile/runtime/test map to Gradle's implementation/runtimeOnly/testImplementation, but the semantics differ slightly). • Reimplement custom Maven plugin executions as equivalent Gradle tasks or plugins, since there's no automatic 1:1 mapping for custom logic. • Validate multi-module structure translates properly into Gradle's settings.gradle and subprojects configuration. • Run both build systems in parallel for a period, comparing outputs (artifacts, test results) to catch behavioral differences before fully cutting over.
Example: After running gradle init on a multi-module Maven project, the generated build.gradle correctly captured basic dependencies, but a custom Maven plugin that generated build metadata had to be rewritten as a custom Gradle task, since there's no automatic conversion for bespoke plugin logic.
Interview Tip: A concise interview answer is:
"I'd start with gradle init to auto-generate an initial build.gradle from the existing pom.xml, then manually verify dependency scopes and rebuild any custom Maven plugin logic as Gradle tasks, since that part doesn't convert automatically. I'd run both build systems in parallel for a while to compare output before fully cutting over."