The other day, I read a tweet by @gnat (nat torkington), saying that fail fast as a mantra was misleading – because the objective was to learn, not to fail.
Actually when I exhort people to fail fast, the objective is to retire a risk. Sure, learning is important, but what is really important to the delivery of software is retiring risk. Either we know something will work, or we know it won’t work. Risk retired, the rest is just work.
What is necessary to fail is a set of success criteria. If it doesn’t meet all the criteria (at the same time), it fails. So when you send your team down the path of a POC or a Spike – with the exhortation to “fail fast”, you also need to provide them with some hard criteria to compare their results against. These criteria should give you an ability to predict whether your POC or Spike has really retired the risk, or whether you are simply kicking the can.
