If you dough is a disc shape:
When I worked as a pizza cook at a popular fast food pizza place, we would put our dough still frozen into what we called a proofer. It was basically a heated cabinet around 130 F. It would defrost and have it's final rise in there. After that we would stretch to make the pizza. You could probably replicate this by putting your dough into a covered pan in the oven without preheating on "low" or "warm". You would also want to put a bowl of boiling water in there to add steam. Just make sure it doesn't burn or get up to temperature. You may want water or oil in there with it so it doesn't dry out.
If you dough is in a ball:
I do this for other frozen foods, but haven't tried it on dough before. Put it in a sealed plastic bag and leave it in warm water. I like to leave it with a constant stream of warm water flowing over the object so the water stays warm. The heat should defrost it and the plastic should keep it dry.
As far as I am aware, you cannot recognize this in advance.
What you describe is due to very damaged cell structure in the fish. The "water" are the fluids contained in and around the fish cells, which make the filets juicy. They flow out when the cell walls in the fish rupture.
The reason for rupturing is that the fluids are water-based, and water expands in the 0 to -4 Celsius range. When meat or fish is flash-frozen, it goes very quickly to under -4, and in the small time it spends in the problem range, the cell walls withstand the pressure from the expanding ice crystals. When it is frozen in a "slow" process, the cell walls rupture. Or, if it was flash-frozen, but sometime during storage it spend long periods above -4, it will also have this problem.
There is no way for you to recognize whether a piece of frozen fish or meat in the supermarket was flash-frozen or not. So sorry, but you have to rely on luck, and maybe try to find if there is a correlation between certain brands and quality by buying them repeatedly.
Best Answer
There are two safe ways to defrost, one more rapid than the other.
First method is to defrost in the refrigerator. This keeps temperature below 40 degrees F, in the safe zone. This will, also, take a while.
Second method is to defrost in the sink under cold running water. The water doesn't have to run rapidly, but it should change regularly. This will defrost the fish more rapidly than in the air (water is a better conductor of heat than air) and will keep the fish in the danger zone for the shortest period of time. If you are not going to cook it immediately, then return to the refrigerator.
If you are deep frying, there are some techniques that will allow you to go direct from frozen to fried, but that is generally done in a professional kitchen where they have powerful fryers that can take the temperature hit and come back strong.