Open Source Component Inventory

If you are working in a big company with many software projects it’s very likely that you are using many open source components as dependency. But how do you keep track of it? How many components are you using in different version of multiple projects? You don’t know? This are questions VersionEye can answer you in seconds.

If VersionEye is monitoring your projects you can take advantage of the “inventory” feature. Simply click on the “inventory” link in your organisation and VersionEye will show you ALL the open source components your organisation is using over all the projects which are monitored by VersionEye. That can look like this.

It’s long list of all the components and below each component you can see which of you projects are using it in which version. If a project is using an out-dated version of the component the line is marked yellow.

Here is another screenshot with some comments to the meaning.

That’s already pretty cool because this open source inventory list is generated in real time, it always shows you the current status of your projects. But the really cool thing is that you can filter the inventory by different criteria like:

•  Teams
• Language
• Project Version
• Duplicates

Let’s make an example. Assume you don’t wanna see the full list of components, you are only interested in open source components which are used in 2 or more different versions over different projects. In that case you would select “All teams”, “All languages”, “All versions”, “only duplicates” and hit the “Filter” button. The result would like similar to this.

In the example above you can see that the component “versioneye-core-j” is used in 2 different versions over 4 different projects.

Now let’s say you only want to see duplicate open source components in the “developers” team. For that you would select the team “developers” in the first field and hit the “Filter” button. Here is an example.

In the example above not ALL projects in the organisation have been analysed. In this example only the projects which belong to the “developers” team have been analysed and now we can see that testng is used in 2 different version over 2 Java projects and capybara is used in 2 different versions over 3 projects.

Now let’s say you want to see the open source dependencies of a team over all projects, but if a dependency is used by another team as well you want to see that as well. For that you would select for example “Team: developers”, “All languages”, “All versions”, “Show duplicates” and hit the “Filter” button.

Now all the dependencies from the “developers” team have been analysed and in this example we can see that the component “versioneye-maven-plugin” is used by 2 projects in the “developers” team AND in addition to that in the last 2 rows we can see that this dependency is used by 2 other projects as well which are in a complete different team.

I hope this new filter options are helpful for your daily work. Leave a comment here if you have feedback.