Stack overflow on Windows
Using JBehave 2.1 or earlier on Windows, for some scenario narratives, you may encounter a StackOverflowError. This is due to a bug in the Sun JDK
While unfortunate, but there are some strategies to work around it:
1. reduce the number of lines in your scenario text.
2. similar lines can confuse regex – thus try to make lines more unique
From JBehave 2.2 or later, the default behaviour is to split the scenarios by keyword and parse by regex only the individual scenarios. This seems to have fixed the issue on rather large stories, of up to 150 steps per scenario, and up to 100 scenarios per story.