These days ProGuard is a dependency of the Android Gradle plugin, and is usually updated along with it. Looking at the output of ./gradlew buildEnvironment (supported since Gradle 2.10) you will see something like
classpath +--- com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.2.3 | \--- com.android.tools.build:gradle-core:2.2.3 ... | +--- net.sf.proguard:proguard-gradle:5.2.1 | | \--- net.sf.proguard:proguard-base:5.2.1
If you want to use another ProGuard version than the one the Android Gradle plugin depends on you can override it like
buildscript { configurations.all { resolutionStrategy { // We want version 5.3.2 instead of 5.2.1. force 'net.sf.proguard:proguard-gradle:5.3.2' } } }