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principles:fail_fast

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Fail Fast (FF)

Variants and Alternative Names

  • Rule of Repair1)
  • Crash Early2)

Context

Principle Statement

A design is better when fails fast, i.e. as soon as an unrepairable erroneous condition is encountered.

Description

Check for erroneous conditions like wrong parameter values, unmet preconditions, violated invariants, etc. In case of methods this means that it checks for errors and reports them for example by means of throwing an exception.

Rationale

Then a failure remains undetected, it propagates through the system ultimately causing other modules to fail. This results in in a more complicated fault removal. Furthermore undesired side effects like corrupted files may occur. A crashed program clearly communicates that there is a problem and is often a better situation than a misbehaving program.

Strategies

  • Check input parameters for validity – especially non-nullness.
  • Throw an Exception.
  • Use assertions.

Origin

Evidence

Relations to Other Principles

Generalizations

Specializations

Contrary Principles

Complementary Principles

  • Postel's Law: While FF is (amongst others) about checking for erroneous parameters, Postel's Law is about not being too strict with parameters. It says that the design should allow for uncommon or strangely arranged (yet meaningful) input data. This does not contradict FF as Postel's Law does not demand to process meaningless or erroneous data.
  • Principle of Least Surprise (PLS): FF is about what a module should do in the case of error. PLS on the other hand is about how the module should behave normally. Furthermore it normally is not a surprise that a module fails when there is an error but a module that doesn't fail when it should, behaves strangely.
  • Murphy's Law (ML): Even better than failing fast is to make errors logically impossible. ML is about this.

Principle Collections

OOD Principle Language
General Principles
ML KISS MIMC DRY GP RoE
Modularization Principles
MP HC ECV
Module Communication Principles
TdA/IE LC DIP
Interface Design Principles
EUHM PLS UP
Internal Module Design Principles
IH/E IAP LSP PSU

Example

Description Status

Further Reading

2)
Andrew Hund and David Thomas The Pragmatic Programmer, p. 120
principles/fail_fast.1630576953.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021-09-02 12:02 by 65.21.179.175