Introduction

  • 2 minutes

Spec-driven development (SDD) is a structured approach to software development that treats specifications as executable sources of truth rather than throwaway planning documents. When you use SDD with AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, the specification guides code generation directly, ensuring the implementation matches your intended behavior from the start.

Imagine you're a developer building a document upload feature for an internal employee dashboard. Rather than iteratively prompting GitHub Copilot with fragmentary instructions and discovering requirements as you go, you use spec-driven development to define clear specifications upfront. GitHub Spec Kit helps you transform specification files into technical plans and implementation tasks, which GitHub Copilot uses to generate aligned, production-ready code.

The topics covered in this module include:

  • Reviewing the spec-driven development approach and its benefits over unstructured AI-assisted development.
  • Examining GitHub Spec Kit components and workflow phases.
  • Establishing project principles with a constitution file.
  • Developing effective specifications that serve as single sources of truth.
  • Creating technical plans that bridge requirements and implementation.
  • Generating actionable implementation tasks from specifications and plans.
  • Examining the GitHub Spec Kit development environment with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot.
  • Scaling spec-driven development for team collaboration.
  • Integrating GitHub Spec Kit into CI/CD and DevOps practices.

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

  • Explain spec-driven development principles and why they benefit large-scale enterprise projects (upfront clarity, fewer regressions, easier maintenance).
  • Implement the GitHub Spec Kit and GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code to generate project artifacts (specifications, plans, tasks) aligned with enterprise development standards.
  • Apply the GitHub Spec Kit in an Azure-integrated scenario, encoding internal engineering guidelines (security, performance, compliance) in a project "Constitution" and ensuring generated plans adhere to these constraints.
  • Execute a spec-driven workflow to build a new feature, from spec creation through automated code generation and iteration.
  • Describe how to integrate GitHub Spec Kit into team workflows and how to extend it for advanced scenarios (such as multi-agent collaboration and CI/CD integration).

Important

To complete this GitHub Copilot training, you must have an active subscription for GitHub Copilot in your personal GitHub account (includes the GitHub Copilot Free plan), or you must be assigned to a subscription managed by an organization or enterprise. Module activities might include GitHub Copilot suggestions that match public code. If you're a member of an organization on GitHub Enterprise Cloud who is assigned to a GitHub Copilot subscription through your organization, the setting for suggestions matching public code might be inherited from your organization or enterprise. If your account blocks suggestions that match public code, module activities might not work as expected.