Essential Code Craft - Specification By Example

June 30th 18:45 BST

£99 + UK VAT

This workshop does not require programming skills.

Over more than 70 years of developing software products and systems, we've learned that misunderstandings about the meaning of requirements is one of the biggest sources of avoidable rework.

Reducing ambiguity in specifications can dramatically reduce the risk of misinterpretation, whether it's among human stakeholders or when we're working with AI coding tools.

If you're asking yourself about Spec-Driven Development: "What should I put in my specifications?", this is the answer that the evidence shows makes the biggest difference to the accuracy of generated code. That means more successful completions in fewer passes, burning fewer tokens.

One of the most effective ways to improve the clarity of requirements is to explore concrete examples of expected system behaviour in stakeholder discussions.

Specification By Example is a requirements communication and capture technique that all stakeholders in software development - customers, designers, developers, testers, InfoSec, operations - can actively participate in, building an unambiguous shared understanding of precisely what the system is expected to do in specific usage scenarios.

And these examples can directly drive the design and development of software that provably meets those expectations, making it highly compatible with approaches like Test-Driven Development.

In this workshop, you will work in small cross-discipline teams to imagine and specify a Minimum Viable Product - the simplest software solution that will enable you to test your hypothesis about what will solve a real-world problem.

You'll learn:

· To drive feature specification from user and business goals

· To capture your specifications in a structured industry-standard format favoured by practitioners of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)

· How specification works in a highly iterative development process, working in small slices that accelerate release cycles and user feedback

· How specifications can align teams and drive different aspects of the development process, including user experience design, internal high-level design, and continuous holistic testing, with these different disciplines all "singing from the same hymn sheet"

* An active personal GitHub account will be useful

This workshop is run from London, UK, and includes a 15-minute break