Finding open-source software dependencies is an essential task for developers looking to build, maintain, or improve their software applications. That’s because software builds on other software, which necessitates dependency management. Dependency management is a key part of modern development because knowing how to easily find and manage dependencies, or individual pieces of software that your application requires to function, is crucial for ensuring application security, quality, and performance. 

But managing dependencies can be complicated, especially when using multiple languages and maintaining legacy and newer software applications. Continue reading for an overview of how to simplify dependency management and more easily secure your applications.

The Need for Dependency Management 

Proper software dependency management has many benefits, including:

• Preventing version conflicts: By explicitly defining and managing the versions of external libraries, developers can prevent conflicts that occur when different parts of a project rely on incompatible versions of the same library.
• Improving development speed: With a well-managed dependency system, developers can quickly add new libraries to their projects without manually handling complex integration issues.
• Making software easier to maintain: Clearly documented dependencies make it easier for other developers to understand how a project is built and update dependencies when needed.
• Increasing application security: Regularly updating dependencies through a management system helps to patch known security vulnerabilities in external libraries.
• Facilitating collaboration: A shared dependency management system allows developers on a team to easily access and use the same libraries, promoting consistency across the project.

Software dependency management ensures that all of the necessary external libraries and frameworks used in a project are properly integrated, preventing issues like version conflicts, compatibility problems, and security vulnerabilities that can arise when managing dependencies poorly. Because managing dependencies manually isn’t feasible, dependency management is typically done using package managers. 

Traditional vs. Modern Dependency Management

A package manager automates the process of installing, updating, configuring, and removing software applications on a computer, essentially managing software packages by keeping track of dependencies and ensuring consistent installations across a system. It allows users to easily add or remove software without manual configuration, often by utilizing a repository of available packages. 

Most programming languages have dedicated package managers, such as npm (JavaScript/Node.js), pip (Python), Maven (Java), and Composer (PHP). These package managers make it easy to search for dependencies using built-in commands (e.g., npm search package-name); however, they are language-specific and have varying levels of visibility into the types and locations of dependencies. 

Some package managers can only see specific types of dependencies or don’t go as far into your dependency tree as others. They might only look at top-level dependencies and not secondary, tertiary, and further dependencies. Or find direct dependencies and not transitive dependencies. Why is this important? Because if you can only see some dependencies, you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary risk from invisible dependencies that could introduce vulnerabilities.

Each dependency can also have its own direct and indirect dependencies, creating a recursive tree of transitive dependencies that all impact the application. Whereas direct dependencies are software components that an application references directly; transitive dependencies are software components that an application’s direct dependencies functionally require but that aren’t direct dependencies.

Modern software applications typically include both direct and transitive dependencies, and leverage different languages for various parts of their functionality, including front-end, back-end, database interactions, and specific features requiring specialized languages, so dependency management across these dependency types and languages can get complex. So, how can development teams simplify dependency management?

How to Simplify Dependency Management

Manually tracking dependencies can be overwhelming, and cobbling together multiple package managers to use depending on the type and complexity of each application is also cumbersome. The solution? Automated software dependency management and dependency scanning tools. 

Automated dependency scanning tools help automatically check for outdated dependencies and flag necessary package updates, alert teams if a dependency has a known vulnerability, and list all instances of a dependency so developers can quickly see where they’re used and easily make updates. To integrate automated dependency management into your software development process, keep in mind the following best practices:

1. Integrate scanning in the CI/CD pipeline to detect issues early.
2. Run dependency checks on every code commit to ensure security and stability before code is pushed live.
3. Schedule regular scanning to look for outdated or vulnerable dependencies, and maintain application health.
4. Use a single dashboard to maintain visibility and report on dependency status.
5. Streamline patch updates and issue remediation as much as possible by ensuring dependency management and scanning tools integrate with other developer tools like issue managers.
6. Maintain a lockfile of dependencies or a complete dependency tree to ensure consistency across different environments.
7. Use Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) tools to track dependencies over time and maintain historical records of dependencies to avoid re-introduction.

By leveraging automated dependency management, developers can focus on writing code rather than manually tracking updates and security fixes. Ensuring dependencies are up to date through the right level of automation improves software application security, stability, and maintainability, while giving you control over important decisions like application architecture and allowable risk. For questions on different dependency management tools or best practices for integrating dependency management into your build pipeline, reach out.