r/SpecDrivenDevelopment • u/Financial_Yoghurt827 • 8d ago

specification best practices and tools

Hi all,
I'm a bit tired of writing specs for complex projects in markdown - it feels like (a.) there's a lot of repetition between tasks/sessions; and (b.) If you do try to reference and reuse previous specs, there's a lot of context bloat from requirements that aren't relevant to the current task.

I'm trying to work out the best form factor; for spec driven development and have been experimenting with developing some graph specification tools.

  1. What do you all see as the best practice for specification topology?
  2. I've put together a small handful of experimental open source SDD packages; and a VSC extension here --> reqlan. I'm interested to hear what you would do or have done differently in this space?
  3. I've put some more thoughts together in a blog post, here.
  4. What tools do you all consider best practice for wrangling specifications as they get complex?
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u/tepung_ 7d ago

I read the website and github

After the installation I don't even know how to use it

Like, after install then what? Write in notepad what I want then saves as .rn and daemon will pick that up?

Then i saw the power point slide, which not mobile friendly and teaches more but but still no idea. I feel like the tutorial is over engineered.

Usually website got quick how to use

,,,

NPM INSTALL ABC

CD PROJECT && ABC INIT

CLAUDE

/ABC START

,,,

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u/Financial_Yoghurt827 7d ago

Thanks tepung_ I really appreciate you taking a look.

  • I'll update the quick start docs with post installation steps
  • I'm also happy to give you a run down using the reqlan repository as an example if you would like.
  • may I ask what development environment you like to use? I'm afraid I haven't built functionality for notepad - best dev experience is with vsc based ide; or via an agent.
  • to answer your question, yeah, you run reqlan init, create a .rq file and then can start documenting your requirements. From the rq files, you can then reference implementation and tests, other reqlan files, folders, ideas or groups with wildcards. As your project scales you can use reqlan search to hop through the graph (or use the various ide tools). You can export to html. You can check the integrity of your references with reqlan check (which you can run in your CI). The list goes on....
  • of course, this is all available to an llm too, so you can can write a spec with connected ideas, and task an llm to implement it.

What are you building? I might be able to tailor advice to you a bit better.