Maven war packaging skipped prior to tests being run

Question

I have a maven project which has some Selenium based integration tests to run in a package called sit. I have configured the failsafe plugin to include test files in the package eg. <include>sit/**/*Test.java</include>.

I am trying to run mvn clean install and when it launches the tests I noticed it hasn't actually run the maven-war-plugin i.e. not packaged it into a war prior to running the tests. If however I run mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true then it does successfully package the war. (I also have the cargo plugin configured to deploy the war which is how I noticed there was an issue as it fails to deploy a non existing war)

The structure of my pom is similar to the below

<project ...>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>a</groupId>
    <artifactId>a</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <dependencies>
       ...
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.18.1</version>

                <configuration>
                    <includes>
                        <include>sit/**/*Test.java</include>
                    </includes>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>integration-test</id>
                        <phase>integration-test</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>integration-test</goal>
                            <goal>verify</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>             
            </plugin>
         </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

Any ideas why it doesn't run the war plugin without setting -Dmaven.test.skip=true?

It does in both scenarios create the class files

Answer 1

Ok it seems the issue was maven-surefire was trying to run the integration tests as unit tests, so we have to explicitly exclude the integration tests from surefires unit tests

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    ...
    <configuration>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>sit/**/*Test.java</exclude>
        </excludes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>