There seems to be a limitation in how groups are executed / discovered in TestNG.

You can mix Arquillian and non Arquillian test in the same Test Suite by including the non Arquillian tests groups, but not the other way around.

The configuration methods of Arquillian does not belong to any group and will be excluded from the run when you define a group. inheritGroups does not take subclass into account when resolving the groups.

@Test(groups = "run-arq")
public class SomeTests extends Arquillian {}

The group "run-arq" is not inherited by the Arquillian super class's configuration methods. Ending in Arquillian trying to invoke a Test method without any before / after features, e.g. container start / deploy