The test-arquillian tests that use EARs do not contain a beans.xml file in test.war - therefore, the BeanManager injected in the test class is null. Until this issue is fixed in Arquillian, we can simply deploy those tests as WARs - most of them are supposed to deploy EJBs and were packaged in EARs at a time when JBoss AS didn't support WAR-packaged EJBs.