Maven Release Plugin provides a standard mechanism to release project
artifacts.
During the various phases of the execution the plugin create various
files, especially if you do a dry run that allows you to see the changes
that the plugin will perform on your pom files
mvn release:prepare -D dryRun=true
It will create
- `release.properties` - copy of the properties to be used
- `pom.xml.releaseBackup` - the pom.xml prior to any changes
- `pom.xml.tag` - the pom.xml as it will look when tagged
- `pom.xml.next` - the pom.xml as it will look for the next iteration