I settled a unit test which is based upon system properties.

When I launch it locally with :
> mvn test -DmyProperty=hello
The system property "myProperty" is passed to my test case (that is to say, when
I do System.getProperty("myProperty"), "hello" is returned)

Whereas when I launch the same test under hudson, system properties are not set
(System.getProperty("myProperty") returns null)