Spec-Driven Development: The Key to Aligning Team and Improving Code Quality

Introduction

In the fast-paced world of software development, teams are constantly striving to deliver high-quality features and products to their users. However, with pressure to move quickly and deadlines it's easy to overlook a better solution, and under the pressure usual “hacks” and “fast solutions” appear in the codebase. Many developers are eager to jump straight into implementation, believe that investigations are not required and team can understand and discuss everything during the Code Review process.

Imagine this scenario: a developer has a great idea of how to implement a new feature and immediately starts coding, without discussing the details with the rest of the team. Days later, after presenting their work during a code review or showing the final result to the team lead after a week of development, they discover that it doesn't align with the project's goals, conflicts with other features, or requires significant rework due to architectural limitations.

In this article, we’ll explore how to address this problem and why technical specs are essential for effective collaboration. We’ll discuss the benefits of technical specs for the team, communication, and the success of your software projects.

The Role of Technical Specs

A technical specification, also known as a technical spec or spec document or tech spec, is a detailed description of the requirements, design, implementation, and testing plans for a software feature or system.

They serve as a detailed description of the feature plan and ensure all stockholders have a clear and shared understanding of the project's goals, requirements, and approach.

Technical spec is a communication tool. This is the place where you can bring all your ideas, and spend some time on feature investigation and how to integrate it into the current software. A place to discuss with your team or cross-team discussions. Also, clearly defining the problem being solved, the proposed solution, and the implementation details and technical specs help to align the team and prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications that can lead to wasted time and effort.

Tech specs are not only about communication, and also they also bring important functions in the development process:

• Validation - the opportunity to discuss and validate your idea with stockholders. This validation could include not only technical side, but the project can also validate requirements and implementation plan.
• Planning - after investigation and clearly describing and agreeing on implementation it’s much easier to get an estimation rather than try to guess. It breaks down the work into manageable tasks with a description of the development scope and milestones.
• Collaboration - it’s a good place to collaborate among team members. By providing shared understanding you simplify of the feature process of Code Review.
• Documentation - technical specs serve as a form of documentation where you describe technical aspects where developers can learn about the project. They provide a historical record of the project's evolution, allowing new team members to quickly get up to speed and enabling the team to refer back to earlier decisions or rationale when needed.

In short, technical specs are an essential tool for managing complex software development projects. They provide structured, validated, plan and document the work being done.

However, despite their importance, many teams struggle with creating and maintaining effective technical specs. In the next section, we'll explore some of the common challenges that popup when developing features without the guidance of a well-crafted technical spec.

Challenges of Developing Features Without Technical Specs

“When we expect the feature in production?”, “Why do you implement this abstraction, when we already have the library/class that solves the problem?”, “Why this project takes 2 weeks????”, “This project does not align with the company's technical strategy, who developed it this way and why?”. This is an example of questions that many of the software developers hear and not once. Every time when a feature doesn’t have a Technical Specification discussed and aligned there is a big risk to face with these questions one more time and start describing a long unstructured summary of the project answering these questions.
When development starts in a hurry without a clear vision and understanding, many developers go directly to the development process, because they think there is no time for the Tech Spec. However, this approach often leads to a variety of challenges and problems that can hinder the success of the project:

• Miscommunication and misalignment - without a clear and comprehensive technical spec, team members may have different understandings of what needs to be built and how it should be implemented. This could lead to confusion and even arguing about implementation when it already done.
• Scope creep and feature bloat - over-engineering leads to bloated, difficult-to-maintain code. This can also result in delays and budget overruns as the expanding scope.
• Quality issues - without a clear development plan it becomes hard to specify testing requirements and the feature goal. It can be challenging to determine whether a feature is working as intended or meeting the original goals.
• Difficulty in collaboration and code review - technical specs provide a common reference point for team members to discuss and review code changes. Without sharing understanding code reviews can become more time-consuming and takes days, or even weeks.
• Lack source of true - it critical to have one place where team can find all information about the projects, all links, design, related features.
• Technical debt and maintenance challenges - without a clear understanding of the original design and rationale, future developers may struggle to modify or extend the code, leading to further complexity and fragility.

These challenges underscore the importance of investing time and effort into creating Tech specs before starting the development process.

In the next section, we'll explore how technical specs can help teams overcome these challenges and build better software.

Benefits of Sharing Technical Specs Before Writing Code

Preparing and Sharing Technical Specs before development offers numerous benefits:

• Validation of ideas and solutions - presenting all your ideas in a structure way can gather feedback and insights from your team.
• Alignment with project goals and system architecture - tech Specs ensure that the proposed feature aligns overall with the system in the way it should be implemented.
• Identification of dependencies and potential roadblocks - discussing technical solutions and investigation needed for the Technical Spec required deep analysis of the system and how new features can be integrated. It’s a good way to spot dependencies and potential blockers which you can add to the spec.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing - sharing technical strategy could be a good knowledge sharing session, or become an education session where you can show Junior developers which factors you are using during technical decisions. It provides an opportunity for developers to learn from each other, share best practices, and leverage the collective knowledge of the team.
• Efficient allocation of resources - by breaking down the work into smaller, well-defined tasks, developers can better assess the time and resources needed. With better estimation, it becomes more clear when a project can be finished and the potential risks.
• Improved documentation and knowledge transfer - when developers go on vacation it could be a challenge to fix and navigate inside the problem from not your code. By sharing the spec with the team, everyone has access to a single source of truth that captures the key decisions and all important points of the feature.
• Enhanced communication with non-technical stakeholders - for Product Manager, clients or Team lead could benefit from presenting the spec in a clear and accessible format. Developers can help these stakeholders understand the technical aspects of the project and how it aligns with business goals.

In the next part, I’ll share the key aspects of creating Effective Technical Specs.

How to Create Effective Technical Specs

Technical specs could include several parts and depends on your role and company. Try to use one template for all Technical spec as it is easier to navigate and everybody knows where to find parts they are interested in.

The main parts of all technical spaces remain the same:

• Glossary (optional) - you can explain some topic related words and abbreviations.
• Goal - the project goal, could be the product goal of this project.
• Included in this iteration - describe the main point you want to introduce with this tech spec.
• Not included in this iteration - something that our of scope or part that will be done in the next iteration.
• Timeline - here is the estimation project part. It could start with the project milestones and after you can put the timeline of your feature. Include in this timeline all side events that could effect this project like on-call duties, vacations, other projects if needed. After the project you can use this timeline for analytics on how went the project if it missed the deadline or something went wrong.
• Monitoring - this section depends on your position. For Backend developers, it is worth putting in a monitoring strategy. For Frontend it could be Sentry and describe how you can find this error. It could be Sentry tags.
• Analytics (optional) - the Analytics section is marked as optional but highly recommended. It’s a good place to answer the question “How we can track the success/usage of this feature?”. It could be Google analytics events or more specific metrics.
• Cross team dependencies - describe on which team this project depends.
• Technical Strategy - description of how to achieve the project goal with technical tools.
  • Technical part is more essay rather than something really structured because that could include database schema, events or frontend description on how to divide design into components.
  • Using visualisation could help to understand you’re idea. People are meant to understand easier pictures than words. Check Mermeid visualizations tool.
  • Add more code examples where you can discuss the solution with the team. If you want to add migration, there is a good opportunity to add SQL code for this migration.
  • Create subcategory. You can divide technical strategy into smaller features and describe each of them.
• Public endpoint changes (optional) - the section describing if your public API can change and how
• Instructions - as a last section it’s good to add a checklist of what to do before publishing this Technical spec and where and after.

When you prepare the template now I'll try to share some insights on how to implement this process in your team.

Implementing a Technical Spec-Driven Development Process

The idea of using Technical Specs could be scary firstly. It’s good If only one team uses Technical Specs, but for more efficient processes it is better to encourage to use Technical Specs by all teams.

Creating effective technical specs is only half the battle. To truly reap the benefits of a spec-driven development process, you need to ensure that specs are consistently used, maintained, and integrated into your team's workflow.

Here are a few suggestions on how to do this:

• Make specs a required part of the development process - establish a clear development policy where Technical Specification is required for all projects.
• Create task for Technical Spec and track them as a normal task - for clear communication with management, it is better to allocate some time for working on Technical Spec. To do it transparently it is better to create tasks for investigating and documenting a solution.
• Continuously update and refine specs - remember to update your spec if something Changes during the development process.
• Use specs as a tool for knowledge sharing - instead of describing the feature and why you did this, try to share the Tech Spec. Use it for onboarding new developers in your project.

By implementing these strategies and making technical specs a core part of your development process, you can ensure that your team is consistently producing high-quality software that meets the needs of your stakeholders. Spec-driven development may require an initial investment of time and effort, but the long-term benefits - in terms of improved communication, collaboration, and code quality - are well worth it.

Conclusion

In today's fast-paced software development, it's easy to feel pressure to jump straight into coding and skip the critical step of writing technical specs. However, as we've seen throughout this article, taking the time to create clear, comprehensive specs can pay enormous dividends in terms of improved communication, collaboration, and code quality.

Ultimately, the goal of technical specs is not to create more paperwork or bureaucracy, but to enable teams to build better software, faster, and with fewer headaches along the way. By embracing a spec-driven approach, teams can unlock new levels of efficiency, quality, and collaboration, and set themselves up for long-term success.

So if you're not already using technical specs in your development process, now is the time to start. Begin by having a conversation with your team about the benefits and challenges of spec-driven development, and work together to define a process that makes sense for your unique context and goals. It may take some trial and error, but with persistence and iteration, you can make technical specs a key driver of your team's success.