Reconnaissance mission is a great analogy. I think of it as scouting from the Age of Empires.

Besides discovering unknown-unknowns it also helps in conveying design/idea to rest of the team.

The other war analogy was the Byzantine defense. Their policy was to avoid decisive, large-scale battles where a lot can go wrong at once. If an enemy army is incurring, first try to weaken or deter it with lighter forces that also gather intel. If they can't stop the threat, form and advance a larger army with a better-planned supply chain to stop it deeper in the territory.

Which actually doesn't work so well in AoE. The game doesn't have a concept of army supplies, so you usually just want a huge unstoppable army you can send anywhere.

Just never let management see the prototype or they'll consider it done and tell you to move on to something else.

In my experience, this is what actually happens. A developer makes a low-quality, low-effort prototype under the assumption it won’t ship. Someone sees it. It gets shipped. Everyone loses.

Sabotage your prototypes then. Have it reset its state every 5 minutes or deliberately leak memory.

Sneaky move.... but then, in the eyes of some people, you might well appear not competent to put together a working system, so make sure you know your audience.

Ya, this basically.

It helps if you have tests because when prototyping, you can write things in a way which break tests and ideally break other features. It works enough that you can validate the one idea. That way it will never pass CI.

They are cunning. You cannot sabotage it enough to fool them.

"tracer bullet" that shoots through all key parts of the system (agile terminology, I think).