Building the upgrade muscle with OpenRewrite at Tinder

Devin Thomson (Director of Engineering) and Ryan Trontz (Technical Lead) from Tinder walk through four generations of upgrade process maturity: manual spreadsheet-driven migrations, OpenRewrite-powered scripted automation, fully managed PR generation with no stakeholder involvement required, and AI-integrated workflows where LLMs handle the fuzzy 20% that deterministic tooling can’t reach. Along the way they cover moving from JMockit to Mockito at scale, why the first upgrade is always the ugliest, and how bundling repo archival into upgrade initiatives shrinks future scope.