Best Practices in Dependency Management: Cooking a Meal of Gourmet Code

The developer stands at the computer, surrounded by lines of code displayed on the screen. Just like a chef in a kitchen, they have their own “mise en place,” a collection of tools and resources organized and at the ready. 

The developer moves with the same careful attention and purpose as a chef, carefully combining various “ingredients” of packages, libraries, and frameworks, customizing them to their specific needs to cook a meal of gourmet code. 

As they work, they constantly test and taste, making small adjustments and tweaks to the “recipe” of their software application. When satisfied with the results, they serve up their creation to the world, just as a chef presents a perfectly plated dish to a hungry customer.

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A recipe of practices for higher quality code

Whether you are a developer of applications or a chef of entrées, you almost definitely work primarily with components created, packaged, delivered, and maintained by other people. Approximately 85% of every application is open source software. In-restaurant or at-home chefs gather most of their ingredients from third-party vendors or stores.

Ingredients and open source software components both come from elsewhere thus both contain inherent reliance on external factors such as:

• Safety and quality of each component
• Ability to track the supply chain of each component
• Knowledge of conflicts or risks in using certain components together

Be it in your IDE or your mise en place, these components exist as your dependencies.

Just like how a chef must carefully manage the ingredients and set up a recipe, you must carefully manage the dependencies in your software project. In this blog post, we’ll cover a few best practices to help save you time and better manage whatever ingredients you work with in your project.

Monitor dependency vulnerabilities

A chef starts (Read more...)