Maybe you also observed that maven-release-plugin executes all tests twice when you run release:prepare release:perform. This short HOWTO explains why this happens in the first place and demonstrates how you can get rid of the extra test run and save some time during release.

Maven Drools Support

Using time-dependent data

I stumbled across a piece of code the other day, allowing some versioned entity from our domain model to find out whether it's valid from a certain point in time. The corresponding test failed sporadically, so I went and looked into it.