The Maven Release plugin enforces best practices for releasing Maven artifacts. In summary, the release plugin performs the following steps:

1. Validate no local changes against your SCM
2. Validate that there are no SNAPSHOT dependencies
3. Convert the modules to the to-be released version
4. Ensure the build and Unit/Integration tests succeed
5. Commit the changes to SCM, then Tag the release
6. Checkout the tag to a clean location and build/deploy the artifacts

Dealing with failures on Step #2 is where I want to focus today. Continue reading →