The Maven team is pleased to announce the release of the Apache Maven PMD Plugin, version 3.6 A Maven plugin for the PMD toolkit, that produces a report on both code rule violations and detected copy and paste fragments, as well as being able to fail the build based on these metrics. http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-pmd-plugin/ You should specify the version in your project's plugin configuration: <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.6</version> </plugin> Release Notes - Apache Maven PMD Plugin - Version 3.6 Bug * [MPMD-218] Update to PMD 5.3.5 * [MPMD-217] False positive UselessParentheses * [MPMD-215] FieldDeclarationsShouldBeAtStartOfClass false positive * [MPMD-186] Class names with slash are omitted from exclusions on pmd:check Enjoy, -The Maven team