The same five tests fail for automake 1.15 and 1.15.1 on RHEL 7.4. Also
the testsuite itself reports mysterious "Error 1" and "Error 2" upon
termination and that looks questionable :

============================================================================
Testsuite summary for GNU Automake 1.15
============================================================================
# TOTAL: 2693
# PASS:  2422
# SKIP:  226
# XFAIL: 40
# FAIL:  5
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 0
============================================================================
See ./test-suite.log
Please report to bug-automake@gnu.org
============================================================================
gmake[2]: *** [Makefile:3027: test-suite.log] Error 1
gmake[2]: Leaving directory 
'/usr/local/build/automake-1.15_3.10.0-693.11.1.el7.x86_64.001'
gmake[1]: *** [Makefile:3135: check-TESTS] Error 2
gmake[1]: Leaving directory 
'/usr/local/build/automake-1.15_3.10.0-693.11.1.el7.x86_64.001'
gmake: *** [Makefile:3366: check-am] Error 2
admsys@sedna$


The five failed tests are :

FAIL: t/aclocal.sh
FAIL: t/automake-cmdline.tap 4 - list of options terminated by '--' (stderr)
FAIL: t/automake-cmdline.tap 17 - unambiguous incomplete long option
FAIL: t/maken3.sh
FAIL: t/maken3-w.sh

The test suite log is attached as 
test-suite_gnu_automake_1.15_rhel7.4_kern_3.10.0-693.11.1.el7.x86_64.log.xz

Dennis Clarke