trying to solve IT problems

A cool trick I learned today at Devoxx.
In your maven build, you can enforce that a dependency has a version which is “minimum” the version of your transitive dependencies.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-enforcer-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.1</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>enforce</id>
            <configuration>
                <rules>
                    <requireUpperBoundDeps/>
                </rules>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
                <goal>enforce</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>