Create a Walking Skeleton

When people start to talk about what the product might do, they often jump to a vision of the entire product. That means we see all the requirements, the big picture of the product.

It’s tempting to think we need to deliver all of those features. 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, aggregated by several customers. It’s tempting to try to create the database schema that would support all those reports. It’s also tempting to create the entire login/security process at once.

Instead, if you create a walking skeleton, you might say this:

• Let’s have one of each kind of user be able to log in, and we already know their usernames and passwords. That allows you to create a flat file of four entries and still see what the different reports might produce.

• Let’s have each user create just one kind of report: a report by one kind of product for one customer. That also allows you to create a flat file of data to use as input, and maybe not even a pretty report-based format.

I might do this in two ways: to create a paper prototype of the flow of information and as a way to see the user’s flow. As the team and the product owner learn about the product and what the product owner wants next, the team refactors to add more login capability and more report capability.