I observed the following error in one of our builds.

I had to get this job back running quickly, so couldn't debug this issue, but
looks like a recent change to SurefireArchiver has some bad interactions with
surefire plugin 2.3.1.

I run "mvn -cpu -U" and Maven got surefire 2.4.x, and the problem is now gone.

[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building GlassFish v3 Maven2 plugin
[INFO] task-segment: [clean, install]
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [clean:clean]
[INFO] Deleting directory
/files/hudson/workspace/glassfish-v3/v3/build/maven-glassfish-plugin/target
[INFO] [plugin:descriptor]
[WARNING] Goal prefix is: gf; Maven currently expects it to be glassfish
[INFO] Using 2 extractors.
[INFO] Applying extractor for language: java
[INFO] Extractor for language: java found 6 mojo descriptors.
[INFO] Applying extractor for language: bsh
[INFO] Extractor for language: bsh found 0 mojo descriptors.
[INFO] [resources:resources]
[INFO] Using default encoding to copy filtered resources.
Downloading:
http://download.java.net/maven/glassfish/org/kohsuke/sfx4j/sfx4j/1.1/sfx4j-1.1.pom
Downloading:
http://download.java.net/maven/2/org/kohsuke/sfx4j/sfx4j/1.1/sfx4j-1.1.pom
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/kohsuke/sfx4j/sfx4j/1.1/sfx4j-1.1.pom
[INFO] [compiler:compile]
[INFO] Compiling 12 source files to
/files/hudson/workspace/glassfish-v3/v3/build/maven-glassfish-plugin/target/classes
[INFO] [resources:testResources]
[INFO] Using default encoding to copy filtered resources.
[INFO] [compiler:testCompile]
[INFO] Compiling 1 source file to
/files/hudson/workspace/glassfish-v3/v3/build/maven-glassfish-plugin/target/test-classes
[HUDSON] Archiving
/files/hudson/workspace/glassfish-v3/v3/build/maven-glassfish-plugin/pom.xml
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Failed to configure plugin parameters for:
org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.3.1

Cause: Cannot find setter nor field in
org.apache.maven.plugin.surefire.SurefirePlugin for 'skipTests'
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1 minute 11 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Mar 17 11:32:02 PDT 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 21M/128M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------