The following should alvways hold for a recursive method Recursive calls should always address smaller sub-problems for the recursion to terminate It should always have a base case i.e. he first statement is a conditional statement which has a returnnt Tail-recursive methods will always terminate (given infinite memory) The last statement of a recursive method should always be a recursive call to the method (tail-recusion) A smart compiler/run-time environment can reduce usage of stack space if a recursive method is tail- recursive Recursive calls should not address overlapping sub-problems A recursive call may never generate more than one recursive call for the recursion to terminate