Welcome to the website of SpecOps 2026, the 1st International Workshop on Specification-Driven Development Life Cycle. SpecOps brings together researchers and practitioners from Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Artificial Intelligence, and aims to foster dialogue on how AI-powered tools and autonomous agents can transform specifications from static documentation into living, executable, and lifecycle-spanning drivers of modern software and AI system development.

The workshop will be held from October 6th to 8th (tentative) and collocated with ISSTA at the Oakland Marriott City Centre hotel.

Call for Papers

As software systems grow in complexity and autonomy, the gap between stakeholder intent and system implementation widens across the entire development lifecycle. This is a challenge at the heart of modern software engineering: the specification gap. Requirements are often informal and scattered, architectural decisions drift over time, test artifacts only partially capture intent, and legacy codebases frequently lack reliable ground-truth specifications. Re-centering the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) around specifications offers a principled path toward alignment, correctness, and maintainability.

SpecOps 2026 advances a vision of Specification-Driven Development Life Cycle (Spec-Driven SDLC), where specifications serve as first-class artifacts spanning requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and evolution. The workshop explores how foundation models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, Codex, Code Llama) and agentic AI systems can synthesize, refine, validate, and operationalize specifications from heterogeneous sources—including natural language requirements, source code, execution traces, and architectural models—while enabling continuous verification and lifecycle-wide traceability.

Bringing together researchers and practitioners from Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Artificial Intelligence, SpecOps 2026 aims to foster dialogue on how AI-powered tools and autonomous agents can transform specifications from static documentation into living, executable, and lifecycle-spanning drivers of modern software and AI system development.

Topics

We welcome contributions on all aspects of specification synthesis, validation, traceability, datasets, including, but not limited to:

Specification Synthesis from Diverse Sources

• Legacy code analysis: Synthesizing formal specifications (temporal logic, contracts, invariants) from undocumented source code
• Automated Formalization: Translating natural language requirements and user stories into structured, unambiguous formal specifications
• Multi-modal synthesis: Combining code, documentation, test suites, execution traces, and architectural diagrams for comprehensive specification extraction
• Specification-grounded code translation: Using synthesized specifications to ensure semantic preservation during code migration and modernization

Downstream Applications

• Formal verification: Using AI-synthesized specifications for model checking, theorem proving, and static analysis
• Testing and validation: Leveraging specifications for test generation, oracle construction, and regression testing
• AI-assisted development: Specifications as prompts and constraints for code generation agents
• Compliance and certification: Automated extraction of safety/security properties for regulatory compliance

Validation, Evaluation and Human Oversight

• Specification validation: Techniques for assessing correctness, completeness, and consistency of AI-generated specifications, LLM-as-a-judge, Constitutional AI
• Interactive refinement: User-guided iterative improvement of synthesized specifications with explainability
• Evaluation metrics: Defining what makes a “good” specification and measuring synthesis quality
• Uncertainty quantification: Confidence estimation and hallucination detection in LLM-generated specifications
• Human Aspects: Role of developer expertise in AI-assisted specification generation, scalability of human-in-the-loop validation approaches.

Traceability and Evolution

• Traceability automation: Mapping synthesized specifications back to source artifacts (commit histories, architectural decisions, design documents, requirements)
• Specification maintenance: Co-evolution of code and specifications, detecting specification drift
• Change impact analysis: Using specifications to predict and assess the impact of code modifications

Datasets and Benchmarks

• Benchmark datasets: Curated collections of code-specification pairs for training and evaluation
• Industrial case studies: Real-world legacy systems and specification synthesis challenges from industry
• Evaluation frameworks: Standardized protocols for comparing specification synthesis approaches
• Data collection and annotation: Methods for creating high-quality training data for specification synthesis models

Submission Details

We invite three types of submissions:

• Full Papers (page limit: 10 pages, including appendix + 2 pages for references) describing original theoretical or empirical research, new techniques, methods for emerging systems, in-depth case studies and industrial experience reports.
• Short Papers (page limit: 4 pages, including appendix + 1 page for references ) that fall into the following categories:
  • Short Research Papers: Preliminary results, Vision papers, Position papers.
  • Tool Demonstration Papers: Descriptions of tools and systems with live demos at the workshop.
  • Dataset Papers: Descriptions of benchmark datasets and evaluation corpora with an associated artifact.
• Extended Abstracts (page limit: 4 pages, including appendix + 1 page for references ) that fall into the same categories as short papers. While the content is the same as short papers, extended abstracts are not subject to Article Processing Charges (APCs; see https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/article-types).

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must adhere to the ACM SIGPLAN style (acmart format - sigplan subformat, see http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/#acmart-format for detailed instructions) and must be submitted via the SpecOps 2026 author interface of HotCRP ( https://specops26.hotcrp.com). Submission should be in the two-column proceedings format, usually following the LaTeX document class acmart with option sigplan (SIGPLAN/SPLASH-associated) or sigconf (SIGSOFT/ISSTA-associated).

It is recommended to use the review option when submitting a paper; this option enables line numbers for easy reference in reviews. All papers (Full research paper, Short research paper, Tool demonstration paper, Dataset papers) will undergo a double-blind review process. Author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of Full Papers, and self-reference should be avoided and made in the third person.

Proceedings

All accepted Papers will be published by ACM and available via the ACM Digital Library. At least one of the co-authors is expected to present the paper during the workshop.