Recently upgraded from 1.184 to 1.197 and am seeing this error in a m2 style
project:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Failed to configure plugin parameters for:
org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.3

Cause: Cannot find setter nor field in
org.apache.maven.plugin.surefire.SurefirePlugin for 'skipTests'

I suspect that 'skipTests' is a feature of surefire 2.4 and since we've pinned
our surefire version to 2.3 it's not compatible. I found a surefire issue about
this: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SUREFIRE-417 . It may be better to
support the older style -Dmaven.test.skip.exec instead, or maybe have a check
for the required dependencies to use the m2 aggregate style project.
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SUREFIRE-417