It streamlines the software development process by managing dependencies, resolving conflicts, and ensuring consistent builds across different environments.
When software projects grow complex, their build steps may involve multiple programming languages or compilation units, making manual build processes increasingly cumbersome.
Dependencies between code components necessitate careful ordering and potentially different tools for each piece.
Managing these dependencies manually can quickly lead to version conflicts, stale binaries, and difficulty tracking updates, making solutions such as shell scripts too difficult to maintain.
They effectively eliminate roadblocks and accelerates development velocity by enabling engineers to share resources and results.