I know what it is, it is the transitive testng dependency which comes in via the hibernate-validator-test-utils dependency. Basically the same as in the integration module. JUnit and TestNG end up on the classpath and it seems surefire gets a bit confused. Probably tries to find TestNG tests, but there are none. One fix is to add an exclusion, but I think we might be better off setting the scope of TestNG to provided in hibernate-validator-test-utils.