SBT is a build tool made especially for Scala-based development. SBT follows Maven-based naming conventions and declarative dependency management.

SBT provides the following enhancements over Maven:

• Dependencies are in the form of key-value pairs in the build.sbt file, as opposed to the pom.xml file in Maven
• It provides a shell that makes it very handy to perform build operations
• For simple projects without dependencies, you do not even need the build.sbt file

In the build.sbt file, the first line is the project definition:

lazy val root = (project in file(".")) 

Each project has an immutable map of key-value pairs. This map is changed by the settings in SBT, as follows:

lazy val root = (project in file(".")). 
  settings( 
    name := "wordcount" 
  ) 

Every change in the settings field leads to a new map, as it's an immutable map.