walking skeleton

Noun

walking skeleton (plural walking skeletons)

1. An emaciated person.
   • The Soviet troops who liberated Auschwitz were shocked by the condition of the walking skeletons who greeted them.
   • The £20 he received for his body has long since been spent, but he still lives on, tall, thin, and gaunt, even in life a walking skeleton.1897, M. Dinorben Griffith, “A Skeleton Factory”, in Pearson's Magazine, volume 3, page 633
2. An initial, bare-bones implementation of a system or application which provides only the basic core functionality, in order to be able to demonstrate a minimal working product to be further fleshed out later.
   • Instead, think about how little you can do to create a walking skeleton of the product, and add more features as the features have value. Suppose you have a product with a variety of reports: sales by geography, kind of product,[…]2017 October 18, Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, Pragmatic Bookshelf, →ISBN
   • An example of engineering using the walking skeleton model is the Boston Dynamics walking dogs. The first thing that the engineers did for these robotic creatures was to create a power source and mobility framework.2021 June 22, Adedeji B. Badiru, Lauralee Cromarty, Operational Excellence in the New Digital Era, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 55