You don’t have to use the spring-boot-starter-parent, it’s just a way to get started quickly. All it provides are dependency management and plugin management. You can do both yourself, and you can use the spring-boot-dependencies (or equivalently the parent) to manage dependencies if you want a halfway step. To do that, use scope=import like this
<dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
<type>pom</type>
<version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version>
<scope>import</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>