Can you explain what Scope means in Maven and how it affects dependency management?

In Maven, the concept of Scope defines the visibility and lifetime of a dependency in the project. Scope affects when and where the dependency will be used:

• compile (default) — the dependency is available during compilation, testing, and runtime.
• provided — the dependency is needed for compilation but is expected to be provided by the runtime environment (e.g., application server), so it is not included in the final artifact.
• runtime — the dependency is needed only at runtime, not for compilation.
• test — the dependency is used only for testing and is not included in the production build.
• system — similar to provided, but requires specifying a local path to the library.

Using scope helps manage the size of the final artifact, avoid dependency conflicts, and properly organize the build and runtime environment.