What is spec-driven development?

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Technology, Careers, Business

4.5 • 58 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Semantic diffusion, combined with the pace of technology change, makes talking about AI-adjacent practices and techniques incredibly diffficult. There are few better examples of this issue than the term 'spec-driven development'. Although it's not new — its coinage precedes our current AI moment — it has become ubiquitous over the last six months or so as software professionals attempt to develop a vocabulary for talking about how they're developing methods for working successfully with coding agents.

On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler is joined by Laura Tacho — Developer Experience at AWS — to discuss all things spec-driven development. From competing definitions to different interpretations, implementations and workflows, the discussion provides a frank and grounded look at one of the most discussed and debated terms in modern software engineering.

Learn more about Laura's work by visiting her website: https://lauratacho.com/

Read Birgitta's article on spec-driven development on Martin Fowler's website: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html

Learn more about The Future of Software Development Retreat discussed on this episode and explore some of the key insights: https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/events/the-future-of-software-development

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. My name is Begeta Buechila. I'm a distinguished
0:14.4	engineer at ThoughtWorks and a regular, sometimes hosts, sometimes guests on this podcast. And today,
0:20.4	it's just me and one other
0:22.4	person that I'll have a conversation with. And I'm very happy to have Laura Taho here today
0:28.0	to talk to me about spec-driven development. Laura is the former CTO of DX and recently joined
0:34.1	AWS as a senior principal technologist. Hi, Laura. Thanks for taking time to talk to me.
0:41.3	Hello. Very nice that we've been talking about doing a podcast for a couple of years now.
0:45.7	And it's finally worked out. It's glad. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. And we'll have a conversation
0:51.6	today about spec driven development. I have a conversation today about spec-driven development.
0:55.3	I have a bit of history with that topic because when it first kind of started getting traction
1:02.0	was around October, September October last year, and I wrote up my observations of what I was
1:08.7	seeing and that memo on Martin Farler's website actually
1:12.6	still to this day, eight months later, gets a lot of traffic.
1:16.6	But I actually personally have been like staying a little bit on the sidelines since then
1:21.3	for several reasons that we can maybe talk about.
1:25.2	But let's start with definitions maybe and then get into a conversation of where we
1:29.6	think this is eight months after it started gaining traction. What is backdriven development
1:35.1	in your perspective, Laura? I'm so glad that you ask this question because what I observe
1:40.7	from the companies that I work with is that there are lots of different practices
1:46.1	that people all call spectrum and development.
1:49.5	And so it's really kind of like a wide array and there's not a lot of standardization.
1:53.2	When I think about spectrum development, a couple things have to be true.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 21 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Thoughtworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Thoughtworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.