fail fast

English[edit]

fail fast (third-person singular simple present fails fast, present participle failing fast, simple past and past participle failed fast)

(programming) To report immediately any condition likely to cause a failure, rather than attempting to continue.
- 2008, James Shore, Shane Warden, The Art of Agile Development, page 324:
  To prevent these gaps from being a problem, write your code to fail fast. Use assertions to signal the limits of your design; if someone tries to use something that isn't implemented, the assertion will cause his tests to fail.
- 2015, Rachel Alt-Simmons, Agile by Design, page 182:
  In lieu of those unneeded hooks, write code to fail fast and prevent gaps from becoming a problem.
- 2020, Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene, Head First C#, page 339:
  Adding abstract to the base class causes your code to fail fast with an error that's easier to fix.
- 2020, Gabriel N. Schenker, Learn Docker – Fundamentals of Docker 19.x, page 254:
  One of the most important best practices is to fail fast. Code the service in such a way that unrecoverable errors are discovered as early as possible and, if such an error is detected, have the service fail immediately.
(business) To fail earlier rather than later, thus minimizing the fallout and allowing for timely redeployment of resources to another business case or business model.
fail fast and pivot