Maven scope test needs to resolve depdencies - maven

Question

I have a dependency in my pom with <scope>test</scope>. As I understood the scope concept of maven the dependency should only be required during test builds. Nevertheless maven trys to download the dependency during a mvn package which is why I get following build failure:
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 0.278 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2016-04-19T22:11:59+02:00
[INFO] Final Memory: 5M/15M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project my-module: Could not resolve dependencies for project com.mycompany.app:my-module:jar:1: Failure to find group-a:artifact-b:jar:tests:1.0 in https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2 was cached in the local repository, resolution will not be reattempted until the update interval of central has elapsed or updates are forced -> [Help 1]0
I use following pom:
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
<artifactId>my-module</artifactId>
<version>1</version>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>group-a</groupId>
<artifactId>artifact-b</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</project>
Is this intended behavior of maven?
Are there any mitigations to ignore the dependency during package/install/deploy builds?
Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

I couldn't solve the issue, but I found a comfortable way to mitigate the problem. Durring my package I use -Dmaven.test.skip=true parameter. So I defined two profiles one with the dependency and one without. When tests are skipped I deactivate the profile with the dependency.
Nevertheless I would appreciate a solution with the scope tag
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
<artifactId>my-module</artifactId>
<version>1</version>
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>default</id>
<activation>
<activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
</activation>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>group-a</groupId>
<artifactId>artifact-b</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</profile>
<profile>
<id>skip-tests</id>
<activation>
<property>
<name>maven.test.skip</name>
<value>true</value>
</property>
</activation>
</profile>
</profiles>
</project>