I don't think we should stop running the unit tests during the build, that would prevent us from catching obvious regressions or incompatibilities before the package is uploaded.
The real question I think is what do we want to run as part of the autopkgtests? Do we run the unit tests again? The integration tests for the Maven projects having them? I also wonder if the autopkgtests should rebuild the project to run the tests, or rely on a prebuilt test binary installed alongside the main artifact (but this may significantly increase the size of the binary package in some cases).
