The plugin seems to rely on the aspectjrt.jar library being part of the project dependencies. Since my small example project doesn't use aspects itself, this library naturally is missing from the classpath. If the plugin requires this library, my understanding is that it should declare this dependency so maven can automatically include the dependency when executing the plugin. Should this not be possible (which I would find strange since other plugins seem to have no problems declaring dependencies that maven automatically resolves when they are invoked) it would at least be necessary to add this in some form to the projects documentation.