Dependency Management

Managing Dependencies as Explicit Boundaries

Third-party libraries save engineering time, but every dependency also adds a contract that your software must live with. That contract includes more than function signatures. It can include configuration formats, exceptions, lifecycle rules, performance characteristics, release policies, and assumptions that spread through application code. Dependency management is therefore partly a software design problem. The goal is not to avoid dependencies. It is to make important dependencies explicit, contained, and inexpensive to change.