I have a lot of Java Maven projects that use a bunch of imports of different methods, etc., from third-party dependencies.
What is the best way to make sure that after upgrading to new versions of third-party dependencies, everything that was imported from them works exactly the same as with the old versions?
Upgrading to newer versions of dependencies mostly works. I believe however there is no silver bullet for all.
You may want however to upgrade the dependencies one by one, in order to better identify problems when things do not work as expected.
In extreme cases, one can write unit tests to verify the behaviors of 3rd-party dependencies, which your code expects. When the newer versions do not fail any unit tests, you are pretty sure that the upgrade will be fine. In reality if your code is well unit-tested, integration-tested, you should be able to detect any problem with the newer versions early.
