title: How to find where a library is used across multiple pom files
body: <p>We have multiple maven projects depending on on our own common libraries.</p>
  
  <p>When we upgrade a library it would be useful to quickly find out which projects have a dependency on the library (and might need to use the new version)</p>
  
  <p>Obviously I can manually look in all the pom files or write a script to do it but this is less than ideal.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any tools that provide this functionality. e.g. a hudson plugin, Nexus, artifactory etc?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>Some clarifications:</p>
  
  <p>I don't want to upgrade all projects at once. The regression testing and release effort makes this impractical and often unnecessary (even with automated testing and releasing).  I just want a report showing me what may projects may need to have the library upgraded...</p>
  
  <p>Many answers focus around the project itself flagging what version is used. Ideally the solution would work so that for a given library I can ask what uses this. This looks like what the Nexus issue below is talking about.</p>
  
  <p>Hudson does something similar with automated downstream maven builds. I may look into extending this with a hudson plugin. </p>