Which artifact centralizes version management for plugins and dependencies across modules?

• A. Parent POM
• B. BOM
• C. Child POM
• D. Settings.xml

Answer: (B)

Centralizing versions across multiple modules is achieved with a BOM, the Bill of Materials. A BOM is a POM that lists the versions of a set of dependencies (and often plugins) in dependencyManagement. When modules import this BOM, they inherit those specific versions, so every module uses the same versions and you avoid drift. The BOM itself doesn’t bring in dependencies to build; it just fixes the versions to be used by the consuming projects. Modules can then declare dependencies without specifying versions, relying on the BOM to provide them.

A Parent POM can also influence versions via properties or dependencyManagement, but the mechanism described—sharing a unified set of versions across modules via an importable list—is the hallmark of a BOM. Settings.xml is about tool configuration (repositories, servers, proxies) and isn’t used to centralize dependency versions. A Child POM is simply a module that inherits from a parent; it isn’t the tool that centralizes versions across the project.