It was observed that if build fails (if there is a test failure), then not all of the test goals are executed. There are currently two goals: default-test (single ZK) and multi-zk. If default-test has any test failures, we won't ever see multi-zk get executed, and this is a problem because we don't get to run the test suite in a multi-zk setup.
This config change is a workaround for this - we allow failing tests to be retried up to 3 times to make them pass. If they still fail, we will consider them as flaky tests and have to fix them moving forward.