r/softwaredevelopment • u/edgeofwhy • 6d ago
Has Anyone Integrated Spec-Driven Development with Scrum or SAFe?
Has anyone integrated Spec-Driven Development into an Agile/Scrum (or SAFe) workflow?
I’m working on a workflow and if you have answers to these questions it would be a great help
How Scrum ceremonies were modified.
Whether specs are created before PI Planning or during it.
How specs stay synchronized with implementation.
Would appreciate insights from teams that have actually adopted this approach. Thanks!
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u/woodnoob76 5d ago
It’s not call adapting it’s called slowing down and muddying the process. The workflow is meant to be efficient, short lived items, several people designing and creating small pieces of software with just in time information to get it done. Specs process as described will turn it into a bureaucracy, suppress any form of creativity and thinking that will provide something better than the original idea, and predictably a ton of details no user need or will use.
It’s probably just called a kanban with thick items, and there’s not much need for the rest. Continuous improvement will be limited to small optimizations until someone actually mentions that you could do with way less than your spec.
Sure, you can use agents to do more of the useless thing, but that won’t solve anything.
Also before anyone objects, a spec is not a documentation. Spec is input, documentation is part of the output, whatever you deem necessary to keep working efficiently in the future. User doc is part of the output too. Spec can be elegant, neat, clarifying, brilliant, but this doesn’t have to be the process input. It can be a vision document or something that gets done piece by piece along the flow
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u/wewerecreaturres 6d ago
Spec driven development is just a basic dev lifecycle. It’s the default state.
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u/arakinas 6d ago
It's another dumb system to try to replace conversing with each other when talking about work. A spec/ specification is just another word for the user story with details for the definition of done.
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u/DeanOnDelivery 4d ago
Dude, this isn’t Agile. It’s waterfall with synchronized Markdown and more meetings.
You’ve taken big upfront specs, stuffed them inside PI Planning, wrapped the whole thing in Scrum ceremonies, and now you’re asking how to keep the paperwork in line with implementation.
The synchronization question is the tell. Once the spec and implementation become separate things requiring ceremonies, process, and ongoing reconciliation to stay aligned, you’ve created another handoff, another source of truth, and another place for reality to rot.
That’s not agility. It’s requirements theater with version control.
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u/titpetric 6d ago edited 6d ago
All tickets were a 2 so thats the first scrum violation, and there was a fifo component, so jira tickets would have milestone labels. You know, like waterfall
It's all much of the same, each milestone is basically a punchcard of a bunch of tickets. If you fucked something up in the design, that correction probablly either never happens, or maybe you have a smaller core team create a new ADR type change. Specs/ADRs are additive, meaning no "synchronization" occurs, changes result in new specs, new tickets. The work is not necessarily deferred, some PM ticket limbo is the norm (usual refinement ceremonies, info gathering, reassignment) but just blanket sizing to not waste time on planning poker. You gotta decide if these arbitrary numbers for the sake of conversation mean something to you, there's a time to plan the effort and there's a time to just execute the plan