As mentioned by many in this thread, the common cause for this is a recursive method call that doesn't terminate. Where possible avoid the stack overflow and if you this in testing you should consider this in most cases to be a serious bug. In some cases you can configure the thread stack size in Java to be larger to handle some circumstances ( large data sets being managed in local stack storage, long recursive calls) but this will increase the overall memory footprint which can lead to issues in the number of threads available in the VM. Generally if you get this exception the thread and any local data to this thread should be considered toast and not used( ie suspect and possibly corrupt).
