Specification in Continuous Software Development

The procession of lean, agile and DevOps development processes introduces new challenges and offers new chances regarding software specification and documentation. Challenges for instance because specifications, just like code and applications, are subject to continuous change; chances, because continuous software processes make use of a high degree of automation which also introduces efficient means for specification and documentation. In this paper, we describe the continuous software design specification pattern, which contains guidelines and principles for specification in continuous development processes. In these processes, a software system is an evolution of life cycles where each iteration has a start, continuation and end of defining specifications. Therefore, the pattern explicitly distinguishes specifications to be created at the start of an iteration, specifications during an iteration, and a specification-refactoring at the end of each iteration. Apart from the pattern description, this paper describes the principles of continuous software development derived from lean software development, agile, and DevOps.