The following IT blog post takes you through the basics of Maven Shell, and gives a quick lesson on what you can expect from Maven Shell 0.10.
Sonatype has released a nifty utility called Maven Shell that allows developers to execute maven goals/phases in a pre-loaded shell environment, significantly reducing the build time. It does this by loading up a JVM, Maven, and any loaded plugin once and leverages that existing load for each subsequent build. I downloaded the .10 binary and played around with it with a very simple multi-module project.
Read the full article here. And to get started, download the latest release of Maven Shell 0.10.