A walking skeleton is the bare minimum implementation required to achieve your goals. These could be to unblock colleagues, gather feedback or something else. These skeleton becomes the base of your implementation to iterate and improve over.
A great way to achieve this quick iteration and baseline is to start by mocking basic, static responses and improve upon quickly with dynamic mocks. Later, once everything is into place the feature can be finished.
This might be one of the few times where banana software is actually wished for. With a caveat that you finish the feature before it reaches the customer!
The same principle upholds when Validated learning when you’re ideating over apps, and try to quickly get something going through smoke tests or a MVP to draw feedback.
It is part of Incremental development.
Reference
Knuth, L. (2023, June 2). Work in an efficient team. https://lknuth.dev/writings/efficient_team/
Highlights or timestamps
- To quickly iterate, mock the solution from small to bigger pieces. This creates a quick walking skeleton to test and iterate on.
— ^e88e03 from Work in an efficient team