The intention of the changes which were part of HSEARCH-1459 was to centralize the surefire configuration in the parent POM to make it easier to apply consistent settings. The applied changes for this issue only cover parts of the initial work, since only the parent POM is updated, but the modules POMs stayed untouched. There is really no point to this change.

On a tangent, running of tests in alphabetical order is just a work around for a problem we have with JPATestCase. If we can resolve this issue we should actually remove this option.