You can save yourself some headaches by not using transitive dependencies in your Maven builds. This can be enforced with Maven Enforcer. The trade-off is that

You can save yourself some headaches by not using transitive dependencies in your Maven builds. This can be enforced with Maven Enforcer. The trade-off is that you will have to clean unused dependencies. This can be tool-assisted with something like: https://github.com/castor-software/depclean/ https://github.com/castor-software/depclean/ . You can also enforce dependency version convergence with Maven Enforcer. None of this saves you from "jar hell" directly, but it helps prevent you from unknowingly creating a disaster-in-waiting.