I was convinced maven-surefire-plugin classloader was mucked producing NoClassDefFoundError configed maven-surefire-plugin
useSystemClassLoader=true and useManifestOnlyJar=false.NoClassDefFoundError displayed..no joy <useSystemClassLoader>false</useSystemClassLoader>NoClassDefFoundError displayed..still no joy then i read this blog:http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/06/noclassdeffounderror-exception-in.html VM not initializing statics causes NCDFE ??? the original coder was obsessed with static singleton model I ripped out all the statics and went with ctor and voila NoClassDefFoundError disappeared environment: Apache Maven 3.2.5 Java version: 1.8.0_40, vendor: Oracle CorporationJava home: /jdk1.8/jreDefault locale: en_US, platform encoding: Cp1252 why adding static methods or static variables to a class called from maven-surefire-plugin cause NoClassDefFoundError ? Martin
