What does the “default-test” stand for in the maven-surefire plugin

Question

I have defined the following configuration in my pom for surefire with TestNg:

            org.apache.maven.plugins         


        

Answer 1

People wanted to have a way to override the default built-in executions of plugins within Maven.

Maven 3 (or it may have been introduced as early as 2.1.0 or 2.2.0) solved this by defining a default execution id for each plugin execution added to the effective pom by the packaging's lifecycle.

The name of this implicit id is always default-_____ I cannot recall the exact rule that it is generated for.

You can therefore override the packaging's injected executions by defining a matching execution.

To solve your case I would either change unit-tests to default-test or add

            
                default-test
                
                    true
                
            

either will have the same effect, though the unit-tests to default-test solution will be slightly more performant as you only need to invoke two executions of surefire.

The other thing I would point out is you would probably be better off using maven-failsafe-plugin to execute your integration tests as at some point in time you may want to do some stuff pre & post integration testing, and failsafe is designed for that use case (though it should be trivial to switch further down the line)