Comment by DavidVoid
1 day ago
> Product owners and engineers could initially collaborate on this spec and on test cases to enforce business rules. Those should be checked into the project repositories along with the implementing code. There would need to be automated pull-request checks verifying not only that tests pass but that code conforms to the spec. This specification, and not the code that materializes it, is what the team would need to understand, review, and be held accountable for.
This just sounds like typical requirements management software (IBM DOORS for example, which has been around since the 90s).
It's kind of funny how AI evangelists keep re-discovering the need for work methods and systems that have existed for decades.
When I worked as a software developer at a big telecom company and I had no say in what the software was supposed to do, that was up to the software design people--they were the ones responsible for designing the software and defining all the requirements--I was just responsible for implementing that behavior in code.
One of my first tasks at my first job out of college required me to learn dxl (doors extension language) and implement some really intricate requirements management features.
It was gratifying to build the confidence of learning a new language quickly that I had never even heard of before. DXL was also pretty awful.
Opened a lot of doors for me though, no pun intended.
Spec-driven development is basically PRIDE, the first proven commercial software methodology dating back to 1971. In fact it may be the culmination of PRIDE because PRIDE's creators realized coding wasn't the hard part; the hard part was systems analysis, determining what problem needed to be solved and what to build. Coding comes last and when you did it right, was simply a translation step.
And now that step can be 100% automated.
Information systems design was a solved problem in the 1970s. PRIDE turned it from an art into a proven, repeatable science. Programmers, afraid of losing their perceived importance, resisted the discipline it imposes as the mustang resists the bit, but now that they're going the way of buggy-whip makers, maybe systems design as a science will make a comeback after 50 years.