walking skeleton

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.

   • 1897, M. Dinorben Griffith, “A Skeleton Factory”, in Pearson's Magazine, volume 3, page 633:

     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.

   • 2021 July 7, Drachinifel, 20:45 from the start, in Guadalcanal Campaign - Operation Ke & Rennell Island, The Finale: (IJN 6(?) : 5 USN)‎, archived from the original on 4 December 2022:

     The eleven transporting destroyers picked up almost five thousand emaciated walking skeletons that had once been most of the 38th Division of the Japanese Army, heading back home without any loss to the transports, although the escorting destroyer Makigumo exploded just as they were about to leave; cause unknown, possibly a mine.

2. (software engineering) 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.
   • 2017 October 18, Johanna Rothman, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, Pragmatic Bookshelf, →ISBN:

     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, […]

   • 2021 June 22, Adedeji B. Badiru, Lauralee Cromarty, Operational Excellence in the New Digital Era, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 55:

     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.