As you noted, -Dmaven.test.skip=true
skips compiling the tests. More to the point, it skips building the test artifacts. A common practice for large projects is to have testing utilities and base classes shared among modules in the same project.
This is accomplished by having a module require a test-jar
of a previously built module:
<dependency> <groupId>org.myproject.mygroup</groupId> <artifactId>common</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <type>test-jar</type> <scope>test</scope> </dependency>
If -Dmaven.test.skip=true
(or simply -Dmaven.test.skip
) is specified, the test-jar
s aren't built, and any module that relies on them will fail its build.
In contrast, when you use -DskipTests
, Maven does not run the tests, but it does compile them and build the test-jar, making it available for the subsequent modules.