Strategy for debugging surefire “The forked VM terminated without saying properly goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called ?”

Question

I am working on a rather complex java project with many dependencies and many unit tests.

I am using java 1.6.0_65 on mac (mavericks) with maven 3.0.5 with maven-sur

Answer 1

Steps:

(1) Run mvn with the -e and -X options to get more debug information.

(2) Look for "Error" in the output. In my case, when I ran the mvn command, part of the output included:

[ERROR] Command wascmd.exe /X /C "C:\dev\dev-tools\.....

(3) Execute the problematic command directly in the command shell.

In my case, executing

cmd.exe /X /C "C:\dev\dev-tools\....

from the command line resulted in an OutOfMemoryError.