Why Incident Management is Essential For a Successful 'Fail-Forward' Strategy

No matter how much testing or preparation you do, bugs, outages, and unexpected problems will happen. This is where the idea of “failing forward” comes into play.

Failing forward means treating mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve. It’s about making progress even when things go wrong. But to make this work, teams need strong processes to deal with failures when they happen. This is where incident management comes into the picture.

This article dives into why failing forward is an effective approach for software development, and why it only works when paired with reliable incident management practices.

Why Failing Forward Works

Software development is inherently messy. Requirements change, systems grow complex, and not every problem can be anticipated. Failing forward embraces this reality. Instead of fearing failure, teams treat it as part of the process.

Here’s why this mindset is a good fit for software development:

1. Faster Progress
The fail-forward approach encourages teams to prioritize action over perfection. Instead of holding back a release until everything is “just right,” teams push out features quickly, learn from what doesn’t work, and improve. This reduces time spent stuck in endless planning and allows teams to focus on what users need right now.

2. Lower Risk per Release
When teams release smaller updates more frequently, the impact of any single failure is reduced. It’s much easier to fix a small bug in a recent deployment than to untangle a major problem buried in months of changes.

3. Learning as You Go
Each failure gives the team valuable information about their systems, processes, or assumptions. This iterative learning makes the team stronger with every cycle.

4. Builds Resilience
Teams that regularly deal with and learn from failure develop the confidence to take calculated risks. Over time, this builds a culture of adaptability and steady improvement.

The Catch: Failing Forward Only Works with Strong Incident Management

The fail-forward approach can fall apart without the right systems to respond to and recover from failures. This is where incident management becomes critical.

Incident management is the structured process of detecting, responding to, and learning from system failures. Here’s how it supports failing forward:

Quick Recovery
When something breaks, it’s essential to respond immediately. Monitoring tools, automated alerts, and well-documented response plans help teams detect problems quickly and take the right actions to limit the damage.

Clear Roles and Processes
Incident response can easily descend into chaos without a clear plan. Make sure every on-call team member knows their role. Having playbooks ready ensures the team can focus on solving the problem instead of figuring out what to do next.

Learning from Mistakes
Resolving an incident is only half the job. The other half is understanding what went wrong and preventing it from happening again. This is where postmortems come in. By running blameless postmortems, teams can pinpoint the root cause of failures and make meaningful changes without pointing fingers.

Preventing Recurrences
Incident management isn’t just about reacting to problems — it’s about improving systems to make failures less likely in the future. Whether it’s adding more monitoring, refining processes, or improving testing, the goal is to make the next incident easier to handle—or avoid it entirely.

Bringing It Together

Failing forward and incident management complement each other. Here’s how they work together in practice:

1. Move Quickly, but Stay Ready
Release features often, even if there’s a risk of something going wrong. At the same time, have monitoring and incident response systems in place so you can catch issues quickly and fix them before they cause widespread problems.

2. Treat Every Failure as a Learning Opportunity
When an issue arises, focus on understanding why it happened and how to prevent similar problems. Document the findings, share them with the team, and make improvements to your processes and systems.

3. Don't Fear Failure
When failure is treated as a learning opportunity instead of something to avoid at all costs, teams can work with confidence. This mindset encourages faster decision-making, more experimentation, and ultimately better outcomes.

A Real-Life Example

Let’s say a team deploys a new feature on a Friday (a risk, but a calculated one). Within hours, monitoring tools detect an unusual spike in errors.

Step 1: Quick Detection
Automated alerts notify the team, and they immediately begin investigating.

Step 2: Coordinated Response
The incident response plan kicks in. One on-call member leads the effort, while another team member communicates updates to stakeholders.

Step 3: Root Cause Analysis
Once the issue is resolved, the team conducts a postmortem. They discover the root cause was a missing edge case in their tests.

Step 4: Process Improvement
The team updates their testing framework to cover similar scenarios, reducing the risk of the same problem in future deployments.

By the next release, the team is more prepared, faster, and confident they’ve addressed the issue.

Final Thoughts

Failing forward works because it matches the realities of software development. By embracing failure as part of the process, teams can move faster, adapt to change, and improve steadily. But to make this approach sustainable, it needs to be backed by strong incident management processes.

With the right systems in place, failures become less disruptive and more productive. The result? A faster, more resilient team that can handle whatever challenges come their way.

Peer
CPO & Co-Founder of All Quiet