Under many circumstances PCT fails to even run the tests of a plugin: compilation errors, problems transforming the POM, etc. In such cases it does display these details in the build log as well as in the HTML report, but to make sure the problem is not missed (and that the overall build is marked UNSTABLE), it should also create a JUnit-format suite XML file with one testcase for each plugin under test, with the test case marked as a failure in case there was one of these errors. You can put various textual details into the failure element as well. Then jobs running PCT merely need to ensure that their junit pattern matches this synthetic suite.