Publish a bom from a multi-module-project

Question

We are a large company with about 2000 separate Java projects. For historic reasons, we do not have multi-module projects, but we would like to introduce them.

Logically

Answer 1

We are using BOMs as well for our multi-modules projects, but we are not tying their generation or update to the build of those modules.

A BOM is only updated when our release management process completes the delivery of a built module (or group of modules): once delivered, then the BOM is updated and pushed to Nexus (stored as a 1.0-SNAPSHOT version, constantly overridden after each delivery)

The BOM is then included within our POM (for mono or multi-module projects) and use for dependency management only, meaning our projects depends on artifact without the version: the dependency management from the BOM provides with the latest delivered version of other dependent modules.

In other words, we separate the build aspect (done here with maven) from the release part: the "bills of materials" represent what has been delivered, and ensure all projects are building with versions deemed working well together (since they have been delivered into production together).