There are some very useful command line options you can specify when executing maven tests:

-Dtest=[testname], this allows selective execution of unit tests, instead of running them all. [testname] might be full class name, class name without package, or even wildcard.

-Dsurefire.useFile=false, this will force surefire plugin to write failing test info to stdout instead of file in target/surefire-reports/. Can be a huge time saver.