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Tech PrinciplesConceptsFail-Fast

Fail-Fast 🏃

The Principle

The key ideas behind fail-fast are:

  • Fail early in the process rather than later
  • Detect and address failures as soon as possible to prevent accumulation

Failing fast allows you to learn quickly what doesn’t work and prevent bigger disasters. It’s better to have lots of small failures early than to miss them and experience catastrophic failures later.

Benefits

Some benefits of the fail-fast approach:

  • Finds defects early when they are cheaper to fix
  • Prevents small issues from accumulating
  • Reduces overall bug fix costs
  • Shortens time to market
  • Encourages iterative development and testing
  • Builds robustness and resilience into the system

Examples

Fail-fast techniques:

  • Automated testing and continuous integration
  • Incremental development and frequent builds
  • Monitoring of key performance metrics
  • Feature flags to test partially complete features
  • Chaos engineering - deliberately injecting failures
  • Short iterations with frequent product feedback
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