That's great, Cédric C!

You can find out some general hints on getting started with working on Hibernate Validator in the contribution guide. For the topic at hand you might check in the code base how the "fail fast" property is handled which is another HV-specific setting which can be given either via the API http://hibernate.org/validator/contribute/ or XML (property "hibernate.validator.fail_fast"). Programmatically defined constraint mappings are represented by (Default)ConstraintMapping.