Spot on. This has been sort of an obsession of mine lately using the game of hangman and decision theory to "prove" why this works and how it applies to software development.

There are so many dogmas out there (Fail fast, MVP, Agile, Lean, etc) which all boil down to the same thing: Maximizing information gain and minimizing the cost of failure.

I'm planning on a blog post/email course/talk/something in the next few weeks but it's not quite ready yet.