Comparison
Proof of conceptvsWalking skeleton
Proof of concept
you demoed the working prototype and someone asked when it could go live, which was never the plan.
A deliberately incomplete build that shows an approach can work. It skips error handling, security, scale and edge cases on purpose, and its greatest danger is its own success — a convincing demo creates pressure to ship the thing that was never built to be shipped. Say what it omits at the same moment you show it, in the same sentence, every time.
Full entry →Walking skeleton
the first thing built was a thin path all the way from the button to the database, doing almost nothing.
A minimal end-to-end implementation that exercises every layer and deployment step before any of them are fleshed out. It front-loads the integration risk — the wiring, the environments, the authentication, the pipeline — which is where surprises usually live, rather than leaving it for the final week. It is the standard antidote to a project that is ninety percent done on every component and has never once run.
Full entry →