Introduction

Most software projects depend on other software packages to provide its functionality. Actually, the bigger your software project, the more likely is that you end up having a large number of dependencies either internally between different parts of your code or externally with third-party libraries.

The goal of adding a new dependency to your code is to avoid reinventing the wheel. If there is code already available that does what you want, normally you would prefer to re-use it (there are exceptions, though) rather than investing your time in re-writing new code to solve the same task. On the other hand, once your software project has matured over time and is ready for production it may end up being a dependency for other software projects as well.

Grouping off-the-shelf functions into software packages and defining dependencies between them has been traditionally at the core of software development. It…