When you have long running Java projects managed by Maven, you will need to refresh the dependencies to update the libraries used. This will give you security updates, bug fixes, and new features.

You can make Maven do the hard work instead of checking each dependencies by hand.

In general, mvn versions:display-dependency-updates will give you a verbose list of changes you can make.

As always, there’s a lot of configuration options available, which is reasonably well documented at https://www.mojohaus.org/versions-maven-plugin/display-dependency-updates-mojo.html

You can also get Maven to do the updates if you use mvn versions:update-properties and mvn versions:use-latest-releases. By default it will backup the old pom.xml as pom.xml.versionsBackup but that is just an inconvenience when using a proper version control system.