I cannot remember why we did in the first place. I vaguely remember that we had some class isolation issues!? I guess it is a matter of trying. Another option would be to increase the thread count. Again, I cannot remember whether some tests act up and why. We could even make threadCount a property which everyone can override from the command line to match his likings. See also http://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/examples/fork-options-and-parallel-execution.html. I guess we would need to experiment to find the best speedup and potentially deal with test failures (this JPA testcase thing comes to mind here)