Having resources in completely different dir tree makes sense for business apps where they are often maintained by different teams (css, images, ...).
For a testsuite, where all resources are maintained by devs, usually even the same as sources which use them, there's no real reason to keep them separated.

Many devs prefer having resources as close to the sources as possible, which sometime leads to putting text content to .java sources - especially with Arquillian. See ejb/descriptor/AS835TestCase.java at https://github.com/stuartwdouglas/jboss-as/compare/master...tests#diff-20 .

Maven allows to keep sources and resources in the same dir tree.
TODO: Discuss with devs how they'd like this.