Word.ws English Dictionary

fail fast

fail fast verb: to report immediately any condition likely to cause a failure, rather than attempting to continue.

Verb

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

  1. To report immediately any condition likely to cause a failure, rather than attempting to continue.
    • 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.2008, James Shore, Shane Warden, The Art of Agile Development, page 324
    • In lieu of those unneeded hooks, write code to fail fast and prevent gaps from becoming a problem.2015, Rachel Alt-Simmons, Agile by Design, page 182
  2. 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

Examples of fail fast in a sentence

  • Adding abstract to the base class causes your code to fail fast with an error that's easier to fix.2020, Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene, Head First C#, page 339:
  • One of the most important best practices is to fail fast.2020, Gabriel N. Schenker, Learn Docker – Fundamentals of Docker 19.x, page 254:

Forms of fail fast

third-person singular presentfails fast
present participlefailing fast
past participlefailed fast
pastfailed fast

Questions about fail fast

What does fail fast mean?
Fail fast means to report immediately any condition likely to cause a failure, rather than attempting to continue.
How do you use fail fast in a sentence?
Adding abstract to the base class causes your code to fail fast with an error that's easier to fix.
What part of speech is fail fast?
Fail fast is a verb.
What is the past tense of fail fast?
The past tense of fail fast is failed fast.

Words near fail fast in the dictionary

  1. fail and divot
  2. fail at life
  3. fail closed
  4. fail dyke
  5. fail dykes
  6. fail fast
  7. fail of
  8. fail open
  9. fail out
  10. fail over
  11. fail safe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fail fast (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “fail fast.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fail_fast. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.