maven-surefire-plugin skip=true in parent, but skip=false in every other module

For every module except parent in the Axis2 project, in the build section of the pom, the maven-surefire-plugin's "skip" property is set to false, while in the parent it's set to true.

Why is this property set in the parent, only to be immediately overridden in every subproject? As a result of the current configuration, its not possible to control whether tests are run or not using the usual -Dmaven.test.skip flag at the command line.

This seems like it should be changed so that the parent does not specify skip=true, and so that none of the children specify skip=false. This would return control back to the developer, to decide if they want to override tests at any point.