Sounds like they've cocked up the jars they've produced; you should never have to use exclusions, and it's possible to have a dependency that can be satisfied multiple ways with a default, so you shouldn't need to choose the driver separately if you don't want to. Much of that xml file is what already exists for your project. So the fair comparison is with the section: <dependency> <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId> <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId> <version>2.28.0</version> </dependency>

So: you need a groupId; we've learnt through painful experience that this is a good idea to prevent collisions rather than just using the name. That said, your tool should autocomplete it if there's only one option.

You need to specify a version; this is 1000% the Right Thing. Again, your tool will give you a list to choose from.

And yeah, it's a bit of a verbose way to specify those three pieces of information; the point is for it to be easy to automatedly manipulate the pom file.