Word.ws English Dictionary

failing fast

failing fast is the present participle and gerund 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 failing fast

What is failing fast the present participle and gerund of?
Failing fast is the present participle and gerund of fail fast.

Words near failing fast in the dictionary

  1. failgirls
  2. failin'
  3. failing
  4. failing at life
  5. failing closed
  6. failing fast
  7. failing open
  8. failing out
  9. failing over
  10. failing safe
  11. failing that

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: failing 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.

Last updated:

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