step-by-step.md

Day 11: Gather a dependency freshness metric.

You may need to calculate this kind of metrics to ensure you are not too much in debt regarding your dependencies.

The concept of libyear can help us to do so.

• Let's add libyear-maven-plugin to our pom.xml

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>io.github.mfoo</groupId>
      <artifactId>libyear-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>1.0.0</version>
      <executions>
        <execution>
          <id>libyear-analysis</id>
          <goals>
            <goal>analyze</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>
      </executions>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

• Then we run the plugin
  • It calculates the libyears for each dependencies
  • Meaning we have 9 libyears here...

We should definitely do something about it...

This kind of tool can really help teams take decisions regarding dependencies debt. Metrics reassure people.

• A very interesting stuff with this plugin is its configuration

• We can make a build failing based on a given threshold

<configuration>
    <maxLibYears>1</maxLibYears>
</configuration>

• This kind of tool helps us, as a team, to take care of our dependencies
  • Forcing us to update them very regularly
  • It makes dependencies management much, much easier

If you want to know more on "how to keep you dependencies up-to-date", you read this article.