Centralize surefire reports from multiple maven modules

For a long time I have been cursing the maven-site-plugin for not giving me the opportunity to assemble and centralize all surefire reports from my submodules.

One could argue (and I agree) that a benefit of using maven is that it urges you to split your code into logical reusable artifacts (submodules). But at the same time as you don't have the tool to combine reports from the submodules you could easily be loosing the big picture of any errors and failures in your testcases.

Up until now I have either ignored the fact that I couldn't get the big picture (yes, I'm ashamed :-) or implemented a solution using the maven-antrun-plugin and a simple Ant script.
But then my colleague Per showed me the fairly new dashboard-maven-plugin from codehaus and that does exactly what I have been missing for quite some time.

As they say: "The basic purpose of "Maven Dashboard Report Plugin" is to centralize and share all quality informations generated by other Maven report plugins..."

Finally, home grown Ant solutions seem to be history!

Still thinking on this project I worked on last year together with my good friend and colleague Claus, that could benefit from moving to the dashboard-plugin and throw away the ant solution we implemented.