Normally when we run tests in our Gradle build, all our tests are executed and at the end we can see which tests are failing. But what if we want to let the build fail at the first failing test? Especially for a large test suite this can save a lot of time, because we don’t have to run all (failing) tests, we immediately get informed that at least one test is failing.

We can do this by passing the command-line option --fail-fast when we run the test task in Gradle. With this option Gradle will stop the build and report a failure at the first failing test. Instead of passing the command-line option --fail-fast we can set the property failFast of the test task to true. Using the property failFast allows to still fail the build on the first failing test even if we for example run a build task that depends on the test task. The command-line option --fail-fast only works if we run the test task directly, not if it is part of the task graph for our build when we run another task.