AI Leadership
02 / 04Software & Publishing Company
Testing Spec-Driven Delivery through an enterprise AI hackathon.
A software and publishing company wanted to understand whether Spec-Driven Delivery could improve the quality, traceability, and reliability of AI-assisted software development.
01
The experiment
Thirteen early-career technologists formed four teams. Each team received one of two deliberately ambiguous business briefs and the same delivery scaffold: a product specification, technical plan, task list, acceptance criteria, verification record, and reusable AI skills.
Evaluation combined presentations and self-reporting with independent review of the delivered code against each team's own specification. Code-level evidence governed when claims and implementation disagreed.
02
What held
All four teams established traceability from specification through planning and tasks. Every team created at least one reusable AI skill supporting the delivery process.
The strongest approaches tested assumptions before implementation, separated levels of verification evidence, exposed scope boundaries, and helped prevent specification drift.
03
The critical finding
Only two of the four teams produced final verification claims that remained accurate under independent review. One team marked an unimplemented story complete. Another shipped behavior that differed from its specification without reconciling the document.
Blind repository-review scores ranged from 24 to 35 out of 35. Verification discipline separated trustworthy delivery claims from plausible documentation.
04
The operating model
The experiment recommended a shared specification vocabulary, a short workflow orientation before implementation, product-owner access, a mid-event checkpoint, and independently reviewed verification at meaningful delivery boundaries.
It showed that autonomous AI-assisted execution is most dependable inside an explicit evidence model.
Evidence & outcomes
What the work produced.
- 014 of 4 teams created traceable delivery scaffolds
- 024 of 4 teams created reusable SDD-focused AI skills
- 032 of 4 verification claims held under independent code review
- 04A practical governance model for AI-assisted delivery
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