What is the role and purpose of the dependency scope in Maven for managing project dependencies?

In Maven, the dependency scope defines at which stage of the build and runtime the dependency will be used. The main scopes are:

• compile — the dependency is available during compilation, testing, and runtime (default).
• provided — the dependency is needed for compilation but is expected to be provided by the runtime environment (e.g., a servlet container).
• runtime — the dependency is only needed at runtime, not during compilation.
• test — the dependency is used only for testing.
• system — similar to provided, but requires an explicit path to the library.

Proper use of dependency scope helps reduce the size of the final artifact and avoid version conflicts.