The jenkins plugin-pom sets by default uses a concurrency of 1C.

However on a reasonable modern spec developer machine (16GB RAM and 1 quad core CPU with hyperthreading) this causes unit test failures.

As the JVM will detect this machine as a server class machine it will use 1GB of RAM by default. if you have lots of tests this will create 9 JVMs (one for maven and 8 for the unit tests) using a total of 9GB of RAM.
THis is a huge amount of RAM - and it is quite often that there is just not this amount of Free RAM (e.g. running something other than just a OS and a single shell) such that the forks fail.

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-surefire-plugin:2.19.1:test (default-test) on project operations-center-jnlp-controller: ExecutionException Error occurred in starting fork,
check output in log -> [Help 1]

Alas the log does not help show what the issue is, causing a lot of head scratching.

I would suggest the default is given a rethink.