Improve velocity. Decrease bugs. Increase quality.

XSpecs is a full-team collaborative toolset that simplifies the writing of specifications and integrates them into your team's existing workflow.

Features

Single source of truth

Specifications are the communication of intent. Whether that intent is to change a business process, add a new interface design or a refactor a technical concern, XSpecs allows anyone in the team to record that intent as specifications in the codebase. These specifications are used as the single source of truth to drive development, write automated tests, guide exploratory testing, and are used as up-to-date documentation of the system that can be shared.

Bring your own process

Every team is different. Some teams like to write specs as bullet-point acceptance criteria on a ticket, others like to create detailed Given/When/Then scenarios. Some teams like to specify early while others prefer to specify mid-cycle. You can add XSpecs to your process with the confidence that it will provide you and your team with a boost in productivity without hindering your existing ways of working.

Fully integrated into JIRA & Confluence

XSpecs is deeply integrated to JIRA and Confluence. You can create new specifications or link existing ones to JIRA tickets and Confluence pages. Any changes you make in the codebase, in JIRA or in Confluence are automatically reflected everywhere. You can even see test results from your Continuous Integration server in tickets, allowing you to use automated tests as your definition of ready and definition of done.

Benefits

For Business Folks

Product Owners / Product Managers / Business Analysts

With software, you get what you ask for. And often, you get what you don’t ask for! It’s therefore important to be specific with your asks. This is where specifications come in, as they allow you to communicate your intent clearly and precisely. This leads to a smooth development cycle, reducing the guesswork involved for your team. Conversely, when your communication is ambiguous, the team has to spend time figuring out your original intent, leading to delays and rework.

XSpecs can help by:

Creating a shared understanding within the team and allowing a universal domain language to evolve
Establishing a single source of truth that provides both specifications and documentation of your system
Providing developers with the specifications they need to write automated tests and code
Providing testers with the specifications they need to validate the solution being delivered

For Designers

Interaction / User Experience

The specification language by which visual designs are communicated is a well understood topic. However, the same is not true for user flows, information architecture and interaction design disciplines. These disciplines involve a lot of deep thinking and mental modeling, in addition to learning through user testing and other activities. The intent of designs can be lost through ineffective communication, leading to frustration and mistrust between designers and developers.

XSpecs can help by:

Allowing you to clearly communicate the thinking behind your design decisions
Allowing you to evolve the designs by incrementally adding specifications
Encouraging the team to provide feedback on your designs and thinking before entering development
Providing you with a live view of what has already been developed so you can effectively iterate

For Tech Folks

Developers / Architects

High quality communication leads to a good understanding, which in turn leads to speedy delivery. The inverse is also true: Low quality communication leads to a poor understanding, which leads to delays and rework. The quality of communication you receive can be measured through timeliness, accuracy, and precision. When any of these aspects are compromised, new requirements and bug reports become difficult to understand, and your frustration increases as your productivity decreases.

XSpecs can help by:

Enabling you and your team to collaboratively write high quality, timely and accurate specs
Allowing you to provide targeted feedback on the requirements you receive prior to starting development
Storing the specifications in your code repository and and not an outdated document or tool
Automatically showing your progress on tickets through automated tests

For Testers

QA / Analysts / Automation Engineers

All defects can be categorized into one of three types: missing specifications, incorrect specifications or incorrect implementation. The incorrect implementation type is the one teams typically think of when they think of bugs, but in reality these defects make up he minority of bug occurrences. The most common bugs are due to missing specifications and incorrect specifications. You dramatically decrease these figures by starting the QA process earlier.

XSpecs can help by:

Providing you the ability to add "missing specifications" and fix "incorrect specifications"
Allowing you to QA specifications and therefore find bugs before a single line of code is written
Giving you the ability to reports bugs as specifications that can easily be turned into automated tests
Reducing the amount of time you spend performing manual QA as by seeing what has already been automated