This plug-in provides some basic validation and updating mechanisms for your POM.

WARNING: for the pom:validate goal to work, your project descriptor (project.xml) has to be at least parsable and well-formed in the first place (chicken or egg?). If your pom is not well-formed, Maven will fail with a (hopefully useful) error message before any plugin starts to work. If you are having problems getting Maven to run, you should try to validate your pom with an independent validation tool first. See Validation for more details.