Best Practices

SpecDD is a development framework that is designed to promote an agile development process with two deliverables: working software and a quantified product design SpecDD consists of the following best practices:

  • Development is divided into 2-4 week long iterations
  • The product owner team (who manage the design) and development team (who implement the design) should coordinate their efforts
  • Each development iteration has two deliverables: improved working software and an improved product design
  • Requirements are quantified to optimize their ability to drive development and testing.  A specification is the basic unit representing a customer-valued feature or function of the software to be developed.  A specification is a unit that can be used for resource and timeline planning, code implementation, and QA testing.
  • The scope of an iteration (which specifications will be delivered at the conclusion of the iteration) can change if either the working software or a better understanding of business needs mandates such a change.
  • Development work should be based on a quantified product design: any tasks are linked to specifications.
  • QA testing should be governed by requirements: a functional testing task is about testing one or many specifications.