Hi Cameleers, I thought you might find this interesting, the Surefire Maven plugin has an option to search dependencies for tests (dependenciesToScan[1]), so you can create a POM file with the version of the artifact you want to test and the tests you want to run.
In my case I first deployed test-jar to local maven repository from code in master (mvn jar:test-jar install), this gives me 2.20.0-SNAPSHOT test jar, then I added dependencies to this artifact (tests classifier), the 2.19.0 staged dependency and the dependencies needed by the tests. It is unfortunate that the test jar's transitive dependencies do not get added[2], but we could probably structure the Maven modules or create some tooling to make this more straightforward, zoran [1] https://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/test-mojo.html#dependenciesToScan [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-1378 -- Zoran Regvart