I have many projects structured such that they are dependent on common libraries. These common library jars are published by Maven. My projects are also built by Maven. Idea seems to struggle to pick up newly changed jars in the common libraries. For example, if I change (add / remove / delete) the API of a class in the common libraries, then re-publish the jars to the local repo, Idea doesn't pick up the change. It usually takes a restart before it will pick up the change. Sometimes I have to trash the project file it creates and re-import the pom. I've stopped using the build-in Maven integration because of this and gone back to the Maven idea plugin to generate project files.