How does Gradle report and handle build failures across tasks?

By default, Gradle stops the build as soon as any task fails, without starting any task that hasn't already begun — failing fast rather than continuing to burn time on a build that's already known to be broken. Tasks already running or already completed successfully aren't rolled back; the failure just halts further progress through the remaining task graph.

./gradlew build --continue

The --continue flag changes this: Gradle keeps executing every task whose dependencies didn't fail, collecting all independent failures, and reports the full set at the end instead of stopping at the first one. This is particularly useful in CI or when running a broad task like check across many independent modules — without --continue, a single failing module's test can hide failures in other, unrelated modules that would otherwise have also failed, since Gradle never got to them. The final failure report lists each failed task with its exception, and --stacktrace adds the full stack trace for deeper diagnosis beyond the default summary.