How can I effectively track interdependencies between repositories in a large organization?

If you're open to it, adopting a monorepo strategy can really streamline dependency management. With a monorepo, you can test all affected components in one go whenever a change is made—this can prevent the chaos caused by breaking changes across multiple repositories. We follow a strict rule of determinism, ensuring all external dependencies are pinned to specific versions. It's worked out well for us, making the release process much smoother.

An interesting approach might be creating a mock API that various projects can test against before they hit the integration environment. By versioning this mock API and ensuring that each team contributes to its upkeep, you can have a safety net to see which project versions have been tested against specific mock versions.

In theory, maintained versioning should avoid breaking changes from crashing everything. However, in practice, CI templates and shared Docker images often end up being tracked by mutable branches like `main`, which is what leads to sudden failures when someone pushes a breaking change. No one expects a simple push to break their pipeline! It would help if there were a clearer method to visualize who depends on what, especially when planning a significant update.

One effective strategy is to maintain versioning for all shared components like Docker images and Terraform modules. Instead of using the `latest` tag, each repository can pin to a specific version. This way, a breaking change won't disrupt everything at once. Additionally, some teams automate the creation of a dependency map by scanning their repositories to identify common dependencies. Though not perfect, it provides a decent overview of dependencies and should help mitigate sudden issues when something breaks.