What is the difference between maven surefire report plugin and maven surefire plugin

Question

What is the difference between maven surefire report plugin and maven surefire plugin and when they will be used

Answer 1

• maven-surefire-plugin is designed for running unit tests and if any of the tests fail then it will fail the build immediately.

• maven-surefire-report-plugin uses the generated *.xml files under /target/surefire-reports and creates web view of surefire test.

Answer 2

The surefire plugin is used to run unit tests, while the surefire report plugin can be used to write a test report for the maven site.