title: Skip maven phases in the forked lifecycle of plugins in Maven 3
body: <p>Most coverage plugins fork a lifecycle to prevent mixing up the instrumented byte code and the production code. Maven seems to force any lifecycle to perform completely till the specified phase, so the in the lifecycles that coverage plugins fork often execute all phases that are prior to <code>test</code>.</p>
  
  <p>It seems only the <code>compile</code> phase is really needed for this forked lifecycle because everything else is completely the same as the original lifecycle, e.g., <code>checkstyle</code> plugin, <code>generate-sources</code>, <code>test-compile</code>, and others. Running these phases repeatedly also takes a lot of extra time when the project is large.</p>
  
  <p>So, in general, or in the above case, is there any way to let the forked lifecycle to skip some phases that are not necessary?</p>