title: Why Surefire plugin is need in Maven?
body: <p>I have used Maven for a while. In my previous projects, i did not create pom.xml from scratch, and I've seen Surefire plugin always already added to POM.</p>
  
  <p>At first I thought Surefire is a must for Maven to be able to search for test java files to run, however even after I remove Surefire plugin from POM, Maven is still able to find the test cases under src/test/java.</p>
  
  <p>So is the purpose of Surefire to add additional features such as in:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/" rel="nofollow">https://maven.apache.org/surefire/maven-surefire-plugin/</a></p>
  
  <p>but not absolutely necessary to run "mvn test"?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>