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

Changing the configuration of the plugin should resolve the problem:

  [...]
  
    
      
        org.apache.maven.plugins
        maven-surefire-plugin
        3.0.0-M1
        
          false
        
      
    
  
  [...]

As suggested in this post and in the main documentation of the plugin.