Organizations everywhere use open source to expedite development, lower costs, and improve performance. Our annual State of the Software Supply Chain reports consistently reaffirm that open source comprises up to 90% of modern software solutions.

However, enterprises also take on more open source risk as they lean more on open source software. Security concerns abound with leveraging open source components in software supply chains.

Ironically, perception remains disconnected from reality as data often shows a significant gap between perceived and actual software supply chain maturity within organizations. Many organizations tend to overestimate their readiness for handling open source dependencies, fostering an illusory sense of security in their practices.

To emphasize this point, observe that the highly regulated finance industry has formed an Open Source Readiness special interest group specifically to address the risks and hurdles associated with the adoption of open source software.

In this context, development teams must thoroughly map software dependencies — the open source libraries and packages your code depends on — to effectively track their software’s different relationships and connections. Dependency mapping is critical for preventing security vulnerabilities like Log4j as well as predicting how licenses and updates impact performance.

If you want to learn more about dependency mapping, check out the fundamentals below. This blog post explores what dependency mapping is, the benefits of mapping dependencies, and some tools that make the process easy.

Understanding Dependency Mapping

Dependency mapping is the process of identifying and visualizing all software dependencies within an application.

Similar to a software bill of materials (SBOM), dependency mapping creates a comprehensive inventory of all external dependencies used in a software project. However, application dependency mapping intends to provide a clearer picture of which components rely on others and how changes or updates in one component can affect the system.

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