To execute assembly-plugin steps which require a version number free of the -SNAPSHOT suffix, I created a project with a layout of this form:
<project>
<properties>
<project.shortversion>1.1.0</project.shortversion>
<project.shortname>test</project.shortname>
</properties>

<groupId>com.example<groupId>
<artifactId>artifactclass-${project.shortname}<artifactId>
<version>${project.shortversion}-SNAPSHOT</version>
</project>

The project executed successfully running maven from a terminal (producing an artifact correctly named 'artifactclass-test-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar'), however Hudson's POM parser failed with this console output:

Parsing POMs
ERROR: Failed to parse POMs
hudson.maven.MavenEmbedder$1: Failed to validate POM for project com.example:artifactclass-${project.shortname} at /home/hudson/jobs/test/pom.xml

• [0] 'artifactId' with value 'artifactclass-${project.shortname}' does not match a valid id pattern.
  at hudson.maven.MavenEmbedder.readProject(MavenEmbedder.java:334)
  at hudson.maven.MavenUtil.resolveModules(MavenUtil.java:226)
  [...]
  Caused by: org.apache.maven.project.InvalidProjectModelException: Failed to validate POM for project com.example:artifactclass-${project.shortname} at /home/hudson/jobs/test/pom.xml
  at org.apache.maven.project.DefaultMavenProjectBuilder.processProjectLogic(DefaultMavenProjectBuilder.java:1108)
  at org.apache.maven.project.DefaultMavenProjectBuilder.buildInternal(DefaultMavenProjectBuilder.java:878)

Changing the property names to not contain 'project' allowed the build to complete.