Maven Failsafe plugin build error: SurefireBooterForkException: The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

When you get this exception during running mvn clean verify, which executes both the Surefire and Failsafe plugin (for which the last one uses the Surefire plugin!):

SurefireBooterForkException: The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

it can mean several things. For example as the message says maybe somewhere in your integration tests you call System.exit, which you shouldn't do. That one is easy to find. Also this Stackoverflow post covers that plus some other options, like shortage of memory.

It has also higher chance on happening when using the docker-maven image and 3.x-openjdk-8 or 3.y-openjdk-10.

But if that doesn't fix it, what then?  Then due to this issue you probably have to add this property in your pom.xml in the configuration of both the Surefire and the Failsafe plugin:

<usesystemclassloader>false</usesystemclassloader>

Thus not only for the Failsafe plugin, for both! :)

PS: adding that configuration property also is a workaround for https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SUREFIRE-1588, also reported here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50661648/spring-boot-fails-to-run-maven-surefire-plugin-classnotfoundexception-org-apache/50661649#50661649