Spec-driven development with AI - is anyone using this?

I saw this post today and am keen to learn more about it. Have any of you tried SDD yet? Anyone know good resources to learn more? I searched around here a bit and didn’t find anything, but I’m not always great at searching. BDD and Spec-Driven Development: A New Player in the Agile Testing Quadrants

**** Update ***** One of the other communities I’m in has a demo coming up 30 September at noon Eastern time, from Saul Williamson, he’s going to share his real-life experiences with spec-driven development in a live demo. You can find details by going to https://dora.community/ and scroll down to the community calendar. (I can’t seem to get a direct link, because this is Google land, and it just tries to put something on your Google calendar! :joy: )

I would still love to learn about more real-life experiences of SDD!

(I’m having trouble with the dropdowns here… I hope I picked correctly)

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I suspect if the idea became practice they would come up with a better name for it.

As the article raises BDD for many was about discussions, collaboration, communication and stakeholder alignment whilst also leveraging from development by example in this case product behaviors. The automated coverage was also a reasonable secondary byproduct.

In SDD where do your specifications come from?

BDD could be used to create your specifications so its still BDD rather than SDD in that case.

So you have specifications, AI then creates unit tests, from the unit tests it creates product code, from the product code it creates acceptance tests and round we go. Maybe we could create acceptance tests, then create the code, then create the unit tests or any mix and match or resequencing of above.

It sounds a bit like a solo hobbiest approach and for that it may suffice.

I’d be wary having the AI agent designer, developer and tester with just a conducting role simulating BDD at least at this point.

I had a discussion that I will explore further that the AI agents can be really good at rapid prototyping and already people seem to be finding value in this. I like that prototype level, give me a prototype level code, tests, acceptance tests etc so the Agents as accelerators to get started, similarly with testing generating small prototype tools to run risk experiments.

To go from the prototype level to full product though I still feel Humans at the Helm remains key and not just a solo human, a team of them.

So for me we are not there yet, I like the idea that at some point I’ll wake up in the morning and have an idea of an app that will help me do something that day, I specify this to my group of agents and its up and running by the time I’ve got a coffee and the A-team’s theme tune has finished. Real time apps as you need them for real time challenges. Not there yet in my view and I’m not sure what we lose would be worth it.

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@lisacrispin,

Actually, I’m just recently getting into Spec-Driven Development myself, so I can’t say that I have been practicing it in a real project. It probably is still in its infancy with the appearance of GitHub’s SpecKit as probably the most advanced progression into it.

Interesting idea: Whereas specifications might simply be documentation, here they are executable, and AIs can generate tests and code from them or iterate until everything passes. So, I guess it looks more like an extension of BDD/TDD rather than a replacement.

If you want to go deeper, these two are the best starting points: Sean Grove’s “Prompt Engineering is Dead -Specifications are the Future” and “GitHub SpecKit First Look.”

As for the curious one, how it actually gets put into practice-there’s got to be someone who has done it firsthand so we could find out.

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