When you have a multi-module maven project, if you get a test failure, it will hide maven build errors you get later in the build (these errors are more critical than a test failure and hiding them could be a serious problem). In this case, the jenkins result would be unstable when it should be failure.

Example:

Project

• Module A: build ends with test failures.
• Module B: build ends with build errors (for example in maven, not finding a pom dependency)

In this scenario when the build of the whole project ends, the jenkins result would be unstable when i think it should be failure.

I have found this bug in versions 1.455 and 1.462