I seem to be starting a series of posts on good advice gone bad.  KISS is a great piece of advice, Fail Early is another.  Like KISS, it’s advice that scales: it’s as appropriate to function design (don’t return spurious default values on failure) as it is to project management (find out that something’s gone wrong now, not in three months time).  The basic idea is the same: provide instant feedback that something is wrong.  Don’t let the problem grow. On the other hand, there’s nothing in “Fail Early” that says that you need to completely fail.  I once was advising...