Ok. Are there any issues with the code base itself, or just how the TCK is run?

Only

Ok. What is the problem? Which AS version are you using? It might not be so easy to update JBoss and Arquillian versions. The problem is that the framework to run the incontainer tests was back then very tied into specific versions of these dependencies (this was pre Arquillian). There is probably more needed than a simple dependency upgrade.

I didn't look into it closely, but that old-7.1.0.Beta1b doesn't start on JDK8 (I think 7.2.0.Final has same problem). I'm fine with current solution, jboss.home property is everything I need, I have to test against last EAP build. It doesn't make sense to me to test with old AS version.

Ok. If you are making more changes to the test runner setup feel free to share

I'm building Validator from our productization repo. There won't be this fix until (and if) next version is released. So I only need to download latest pom from github or edit pom.xml directly in our TCK script.