See Spec-Driven Development in Action with Jama Connect
Spec-driven development (SDD) makes approved specifications the authoritative source for AI-assisted implementation. Instead of relying on isolated prompts, teams give coding agents governed requirements that define what to build while maintaining human oversight from review through validation.
In this demo, Patrick Knowles uses Jama Connect and Jama Connect MCP to update a calculator specification, generate a plan, tasks, and working code in Codex, and then review and validate the results. See how SDD connects requirements to implementation in minutes while preserving Live Traceability™.
Spec-Driven Development with Jama Connect MCP
Transcript
Hello. My name is Patrick Knowles. I’m the Manager of Solutions and Consulting for Aerospace and Defense here at Jama Software. Today, I’m going to walk you through using Model Context Protocol to perform spec-driven development on a group of requirements for a new software feature.
We’ll do this using the code you see on the right in my IDE, the chat with Codex, and Jama Connect on the left with my different requirements.
The approved requirements are currently included in the software that generates this simple calculator. But as you can see, multiplication and the decimal point are both missing from the current implementation. If you wanted to display something like pi, you would have to enter 22 divided by 7.
Today, we’re going to update this software to add those missing features. Typically, a team would run these requirements through Review Center using the Send for Review feature. For today’s demonstration, I’m going to batch-transition them so we can quickly approve all the requirements.
Bringing requirements into Review Center helps the team keep a human in the loop, even when a large language model is being used to generate new code.
Additionally, the calculator currently has a purple equals sign, and I want it to be orange. To make that change, I’m going to open this individual requirement, change “purple” to “orange,” and save it. The requirement will remain in the approved state, and we’ll be ready to go.
At this point, we’re ready to execute our prompt. You can see that I’ve asked the chatbot on the right to execute a prompt maintained in Jama Connect. I’m going to run that prompt in Codex and review it.
The prompt is configured to include the feature named in the original request to the model, and it will use only approved requirements.
It will also create a human-readable implementation summary containing an implementation plan, completed tasks, and a walkthrough. After the code is generated, the team can review this summary to confirm that the implementation is appropriate.
The process will relate these items, allowing us to use Jama Connect’s Live Traceability™ to view the connected information.
Now we can see on the right that, in just a few moments, the code has been generated and several elements have changed. We can review those changes directly in the editor to confirm that they are acceptable.
We can also see an updated implementation summary directly in Jama Connect. It describes the implementation plan, the tasks completed—including the updates to the three requirements we needed to implement—and a walkthrough of the changes made in the tool.
If we run the application now, we can see that the calculator has a multiplication button, an orange equals sign, and a decimal point. We can enter 3.14 and, if we want to multiply it by two, we can do that as well.
Previously, the application wasn’t capable of doing that. In just a few moments, we added those capabilities with Jama Connect and its MCP integration.
Spec-driven development is a powerful approach for software development, as well as integrated hardware development that depends on software. Teams can create requirements and specifications in Jama Connect, deliver that governed context through Model Context Protocol to a large language model, and use it to generate code.
One of the most important aspects of today’s demonstration is that it uses a simple framework that can be implemented within nearly any requirements traceability information model already in Jama Connect. Teams can use features as functions, concepts of operations, design reference missions, or other guiding stakeholder-level information. Those requirements can also expand across multiple levels to influence the code in different ways.
This has been a quick overview of spec-driven development in Jama Connect using Model Context Protocol integration.
