The Walking Skeleton

A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel.

– Alistair Cockburn

We highly suggest this approach when you are beginning development from scratch. Since we can't really get feedback before the pipeline is complete and, especially in distributed systems, integration points are one of the main sources of pain (including misconfigurations, access keys, availability of network), building the thinnest end-to-end slice of the system is very valuable, because it forces us to face the difficult infrastructural problem first while we still have time and the code base is almost empty.

The great advantage is that once the walking skeleton is working, it means that all the infrastructure we need for running our code and acceptance...