Q:

Why does maven need to generate a pom-transformed.xml?

In a maven webapp project, I noticed that there is a file in the target directory called pom-transformed.xml. How does maven use this file ? 

A:

I think that this is something to do with the transformation of artifact ids and version numbers that happened as part of the release step in Maven 2.1.x and early versions of 2.2.x.  But I think this transformation was found to be broken, and has been removed from later Maven 2.2.x releases pending a redesign; e.g. see this Jira item.
If you see the file, you might be using an out-of-date version of Maven.

