Title: Skipping test execution but not test compilation
Date: 2007-05-17
lang: en

In more complicated Maven builds you might package your tests along with your normal code to use in other modules (see plugin doc to the [maven-jar-plugin](http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-jar-plugin/index.html) how to do it). For normal development you might not want to execute the unit tests every time you build. Compiling the source with

	::shell
    mvn compile

won't build the tests which might fail the whole build as other modules depend on the compiled test classes. So you might be tempted to use

	::shell
    mvn compile test-compile

which won't do the job either because the tests won't be compiled. At first glance using

	::shell
    mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true test

seems to be what you want to do but alas, the tests won't be compiled in this case either. The solution to this problem is to use

	::shell
    mvn -Dmaven.test.skip.exec=true test

which actually enters the test phase (which in turn compiles the tests) but skips only the execution of the unit tests.