maven-release-plugin

I think one of the nicer things about Maven is pluggability ( apart from ability to have mulptiple profiles).

Maven release plugin abstracts a bunch of task to be performed pre-release. This plugin comes default with maven 2.x.

This simple command does all the hard work for you:
  mvn release:clean release:prepare release:perform

This cleans any previous release config, tags the release, increments the snapshot version , commits themand finally sends artefacts to proxy maven repository(like archiva).

Gotchas:
1. This happened when I tried using release feature for the first time.
It would fail saying cannot tag the release.. inspite of able to commit the code with version changes.

Solution:
    <plugin>
         <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>2.0-beta-9</version>
     </plugin>      

Also check the scm config in your pom

 <scm>
        <connection>scm:svn:svn://svn.company.com/my_project/trunk</connection>
        <developerConnection>scm:svn:svn://svn.company.com/my_project/trunk</developerConnection>
        <url>http://svn.company.com/my_project/trunk</url>
    </scm>