If you're building projects with Maven, you're most likely building Java projects, or projects that heavily use some parts of the Java platform, and you're likely familiar with longer builds.

If your project takes more than a small number of seconds to build, there's a significant chance that after triggering a build, you switch your attention to something else -- you check your email, you read news, you do something to pass the time. If your build fails quickly, you might not notice the failure for several minutes because you're busy looking at something else. Accordingly, it's helpful to get notifications that can let you know that the build is complete or has failed, so that you can get back to the task at hand, building software, as soon as possible.

I wrote a script to ensure builds results are displayed by Ubuntu Notify OSD