How can I make a Maven module only go until the test phase when the parent gets deployed?

I'm working on a multi-module project. One of our module is a tests project, which tests the other modules.

First question: is it a good pratice?

The Maven build lifecycle phases are:

1. validate
2. compile
3. test
4. package
5. integration-test
6. verify
7. install
8. deploy

When installing or deploying the parent module, how can I make the tests module only go until the test phase, i.e. to skip package and following phases? Since the only purpose of this module is to test the other ones.