Spring Roo's mission statement is to "fundamentally improve Java developer productivity without compromising engineering integrity or flexibility".

[3] The technology was first demonstrated during the opening keynote at the SpringOne Europe developer conference on 27 April 2009, with an initial alpha release concurrently being published.

During the keynote an application was built live on-stage that would be used by conference attendees to vote on the preferred name for the project (which at that time was codenamed "Roo" within SpringSource).

The 1.1.0 release moved to an OSGi foundation with associated add-on discovery model, plus added support for incremental database reverse engineering, Spring MVC page complexity reduction, Google Web Toolkit, Google App Engine, Apache Solr, JSON and smaller features like serializable automation.

One key design goal of Roo is to ensure a user can continue to work in a "natural way", which typically means using their preferred integrated development environment (IDE) or text editor for most tasks.

The user interface shell supports extensive usability features including command-line completion (i.e. press TAB), online help, hinting (a form of context-sensitive help) and contextual awareness (which provides automatic inference of likely intentions based on recent activity).