Skipping test execution but not test compilation

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 how to do it). For normal development you might not want to execute the unit tests every time you build. Compiling the source with

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

mvn compile test-compile

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

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

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.