When one of the maven publishers fail, the exceptions with be catched and logged.

In our context, large test reports caused the junitPublisher to fail with an OOM exception. Instead of setting the build to unstable or failed, the exception was catched and the build succeeded. After weeks, we discovered that there were failing tests, since the builds all succeeded.

Therefore, I would suggest to set the build result to failed when an exception is thrown by any Maven publisher.