Not exactly. The elements will not be added, if workspace contains more than 1000 projects, each depending on each other. Since a correct dependency should be a tree (with leaves that do not depend on other projects), one must be truly dedicated to persist to the full graph of 1000 projects even after the very first circular dependency would break the build. Hence, if we were to be limited to the case of correct dependencies only, then int m = 1; would be quite reasonable. To support an incorrect workspace with circular dependencies, I put int m = 1000; looking at 1000 as an 'infinite number defying any logic' in such a context. But, of course, I agree that my choice was random and Integer.MAX_VALUE is much better fits this definition.