Draft:Specification-driven Development
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| Submission declined on 6 December 2025 by Josedimaria (talk). Neologisms are not considered suitable for Wikipedia unless they receive substantial use and press coverage; this requires strong evidence in independent, reliable, published sources. Links to sites specifically intended to promote the neologism itself do not establish its notability.
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Meaning and use in the context of software development
[edit]It is widely used to refer to
- the "Spec Kit" by GitHub that can be used as an integration with GitHub Copilot and a lot of different models
- the methodological approach of starting with intense loops of refining the specifications before actual development
Other terms and abbreviations that can commonly be found are "spec driven development", "spec-driven development"[1] and "SDD" or just Spec Kit. Since AI-assisted software development is a discipline that is yet finding its forms and standards, a clear, central and commonly shared understanding is missing.
In the context of agile software development it refers to
"[...]an agile approach to Specification-Driven Development, which combines features of Test-Driven Development and the plan-based approach of Design-by-Contract."[2]
More recent publications show a clear focus on specification-driven development using artificial intelligence as a tool in driving the structured development of complex systems, with an emphasis of large language models as a tool.[3][4]
Background & History
[edit]Specification-driven development is a term in the context of AI-assisted software development which is largely associated with GitHub. There is however earlier mention in the context of agile software development as early as 2004[2], yet without mentioning artificial intelligence in that earlier use of the conceptual term. In how far GitHub made use of this previous work is unclear: the terms first scientific appearance is in 2004 by Ostroff, Makalsky and Paige[5] at the Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods and has been described in the abstract as follows:
We present an agile approach to Specification-Driven Development, which combines features of Test-Driven Development and the plan-based approach of Design-by-Contract. We argue that both tests and contracts are different types of specifications, and both are useful and complementary for building high quality software. We conclude that it is useful for being able to switch between writing tests and writing contracts, and explain how Specification-Driven Development supports this capability.[2]
The methodology is clearly intertwined with "Test-driven development" (TDD) and there is academic interest in the use of natural language (which is the main benefit at least according to the fan community) in a scientific paper from 2018 already:
Speeding up the development process of Web Services, while adhering to high quality software standards is a typical requirement in the software industry. This is why industry specialists usually suggest "driven by" development approaches to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose such a methodology that employs Specification Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development in order to facilitate the phases of Web Service requirements elicitation and specification. Furthermore, we introduce gherkin2OAS, a software tool that aspires to bridge the aforementioned development approaches. Through the suggested methodology and tool, one may design and build RESTful services fast, while ensuring proper functionality.[6]
Another popular "source" is a recorded speech by Sean Grove[7] of OpenAI on AI Engineers World Forum Event (AIEWF) in 2025. This clearly refers to specification driven development. Given that GitHub belongs to Microsoft and that there is a really close connection between Microsoft and OpenAI, it is hard to separate the timeline here. First commit of GitHub "Spec Kit" was on August 22, 2025[8], the speech recorded on AIEWF premiered on YouTube on June 11, 2025. So all in all this could just as well have been an orchestrated marketing campaign, neither stating any reference to the earlier emergence of the term in the context of agile software development.
References
[edit]- ^ "Get Started with GitHub Copilot". Programming with GitHub Copilot: 3–15. 2024-08-06. doi:10.1002/9781394319787.ch1.
- ^ a b c Ostroff, Jonathan S.; Makalsky, David; Paige, Richard F. (2004). Eckstein, Jutta; Baumeister, Hubert (eds.). "Agile Specification-Driven Development". Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer: 104–112. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-24853-8_12. ISBN 978-3-540-24853-8.
- ^ Guo, Hua; Ji, Yunhong; Zhou, Xuan (2025-09-15), Sedeve-Kit, a Specification-Driven Development Framework for Building Distributed Systems, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2509.11566, arXiv:2509.11566, retrieved 2025-11-27
- ^ Fisher, Gene; Johnson, Corrigan (2018-02-21). "Specification-Based Testing in Software Engineering Courses". Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. SIGCSE '18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 800–805. doi:10.1145/3159450.3159575. ISBN 978-1-4503-5103-4.
- ^ "Richard Paige - Computer Science, University of York". www.cs.york.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-12-17.
- ^ Dimanidis, Anastasios; Chatzidimitriou, Kyriakos C.; Symeonidis, Andreas L. (2018-04-23). "A Natural Language Driven Approach for Automated Web API Development: Gherkin2OAS". Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018. WWW '18. Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee: 1869–1874. doi:10.1145/3184558.3191654. ISBN 978-1-4503-5640-4.
- ^ AI Engineer (2025-07-11). The New Code — Sean Grove, OpenAI. Retrieved 2025-11-27 – via YouTube.
- ^ github. "Initial commit · github/spec-kit@fa27363". GitHub. Retrieved 2025-11-27.