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Walking Skeleton

TTool · Walking Skeleton

By , Editor · · What’s Next

You've built each piece in isolation. Integration is scheduled for later. Nobody's tested whether the architecture holds together end to end.

A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation that exercises the full system architecture with minimal functionality. You wire every component together — front to back — and prove the integration works before building out features on top of it. The concept was popularised by Alistair Cockburn as a way to surface architectural risk early.

A horizontal flow of five stacked component blocks - client (user interface), API (the contract), service (business logic), store (persistence), and integration (external system) - under the banner 'the thinnest end-to-end path tests the architecture first.'
Method visual — Walking Skeleton
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