Word.ws English Dictionary

fails fast

fails fast is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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 fails fast

What is fails fast the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Fails fast is the third-person singular simple present indicative of fail fast.

Words near fails fast in the dictionary

  1. failovers
  2. failproof
  3. fails
  4. fails at life
  5. fails closed
  6. fails fast
  7. fails open
  8. fails out
  9. fails over
  10. fails safe
  11. fails up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fails 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: “fails fast.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fails_fast. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.