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Fast Fail Technique for Proactive Risk Mitigation
Slow failure is expensive. Design small, deliberate failures that expose risk before it owns you.
Failure is inevitable; speed and containment are optional. Fast fail is not recklessness—it is structured exposure that keeps surprises small.
Problem: hidden risk blooms late
- Teams avoid experiments because they fear blame, so unknowns stay unknown.
- Dependencies are assumed, not tested, until they break in prod.
- Sponsors hear “on track” because nobody measured the unknowns.
Solution: engineer safe collisions
- Design probes: Run time-boxed spikes that intentionally stress the riskiest dependency. Success is learning, not shipping.
- Budget for failure: Reserve a fixed percentage of sprint capacity for risk burn-down. If capacity is zero, risk is growing by default.
- Visible kill criteria: Define upfront what “stop” looks like—latency thresholds, defect counts, or burn variance. Publish it so stopping is a sign of discipline, not defeat.
Smart conclusions
- A controlled failure with a small blast radius is cheaper than a hidden failure with a public postmortem.
- Celebrate teams that stop doomed work early; that is risk governance working.
- Fast fail is a decision habit. Make it explicit, measured, and repeatable.
