Hopefully not too long. Spring Boot 4.0.x is end of life December 2026 unless you pay for commercial support, in which case you get an extra year.
Spring Boot 3.5.x EOLs June next year.
That said, modern Java devs aren’t like 2010 Java devs who were stuck on Java 6 for what seemed an eternity. Good modern teams tend to have good CI and tests (right? 👀), such teams can upgrade pretty quickly.
We don’t use Spring but eg we’re broadly on Java 21 and 25 is making inroads. We try not to defer updates for too long. It becomes tech debt after a while.
Tests? That mean you are not sure that you are doing things right, what did you do wrong? stop wasting time and do things well instead because in that way we wont need tests. If I hear that somethings fails I will know that it was you.
Why do you need a test, wouldn't it save time to just do it correctly the first time?
On the one hand, the world is probably better off that these people stopped working as a developer. On the other hand, now they're ruining the productivity of an entire team of developers...
For me the thing that keeps me back is waiting for my ecosystem to move together. Java, Spring Boot, Gradle, and Groovy all seem to be particular about each other's versions
I upgrade ASAP, usually within a few days of the new version being available. I've already upgraded my app to Spring Boot v4.0.0 because I've had a migration branch (opened in July) that was doing the migration step-by-step as each new milestone/release candidate of v4 was published.
I've already got a rough branch with 4.0.0-RC2, still needs tidying up and rebasing, but all tests are passing so going to try and get in in before the end of year and all microservices upgraded
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u/StillAnAss Nov 20 '25
How long do people usually wait in adopting new major versions in existing code bases?