Lowdependency

Lowdependency is a design principle aimed at minimizing external dependencies in software systems, products, and services to improve reliability, portability, and maintainability. It covers code, architecture, and operational practices, with an emphasis on reducing the risk and complexity that come from relying on many libraries, services, or platforms through decoupling, clear interfaces, and a minimal surface area for change.

Key concepts include decoupling components with well-defined interfaces, applying dependency inversion and inversion of control, modular design, stateless or locally stateful components, and limiting both direct and transitive dependencies. Practices such as favoring lightweight libraries, using standards-based data formats, enabling offline or local-first operation, and avoiding vendor lock-in contribute to lowdependency goals.

Benefits include improved resilience to outages, easier testing, simpler upgrades, a smaller security attack surface, easier portability across environments, and faster build and deployment cycles. Lowdependency also supports better observability and simpler rollback strategies when failures occur.

Implementation approaches involve architecture with clear domain boundaries, dependency injection, modular monoliths or services with explicit interfaces, abstraction layers, and the removal of unused dependencies. Automated tooling for build-time analysis, dependency scanning, version pinning, and monitoring for transitive dependencies and vulnerabilities aid ongoing maintenance. Design patterns that enable graceful degradation when optional dependencies fail are also common.

Challenges exist, such as potential initial development overhead, possible performance costs from abstractions, the risk of under-engineering, and balancing minimal dependencies with feature needs. Governance and documentation are often required to maintain consistency across teams.

See also: loose coupling, modularity, dependency management, offline-first design.