Since not all errors can be caught by the compiler, the maven-erlang-plugin uses the dialyzer to ensure that the code is sane.
The plugin will run the dialyzer on the project sources, checking for errors. If we, for example, have a (in this case not so) sneaky error in some function:
-module(module).
-export([one/1]).
-spec one(term()) ->
term().
one(Arg) when is_integer(Arg) ->
Arg ++ 1; % <--- Here! Not very 1337.
one(Arg) ->
Arg.
Running the mvn package phase, on the project, we get the following output:
Or optionally, specifying the -DdialyzerWarningsAreErrors will ensure that the build immediately fails.
For projects with dependencies the plug-in will automatically include these in the dialyzer analysis. This can be turned off using the parameter -DdialyzerWithDependencies=false.