Parent POMs
The Codice-Parent project was started based on Apache Parent POM and was meant to hold common definitions and plugin management that would be used across all codice projects. Questions about what other projects would use outside of DDF precipitated the creation of DDF-Parent which is mean to hold common properties for DDF and downstream projects. Please reveiw the Maven documentation for more reference on how to interact with POMs: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-pom.html