Word.ws English Dictionary

failed fast

failed fast is the simple past and past participle of fail fast.

Meaning of fail fast

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
  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

Questions about failed fast

What is failed fast the simple past and past participle of?
Failed fast is the simple past and past participle of fail fast.

Words near failed fast in the dictionary

  1. faile
  2. failed
  3. failed at life
  4. failed back syndrome
  5. failed closed
  6. failed fast
  7. failed open
  8. failed out
  9. failed over
  10. failed safe
  11. failed state

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: failed fast (page history and authors); 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: “failed fast.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/failed_fast. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.