Spec-Driven Development in an Agentic QA World
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Test suites fail organisations long before they fail pipelines. A suite written after the fact tests what the software does, not what it was supposed to do - and the gap between those two things is exactly where defects live. Coverage climbs. The signal degrades. Nobody notices, because the numbers look healthy.
The classic defence is discipline: review tests against requirements, keep documentation current, run acceptance sessions. Those practices work when teams have time for them, and discipline is the first casualty of a tight sprint.
Agents make the problem acute rather than gradual. An assistant can generate a suite in minutes and repair a failing test in seconds, and when it is optimising for a passing test it will loosen an assertion, broaden a selector, or extend a timeout before it questions whether the underlying behaviour is correct. Without a specification to check against, there is no mechanism that catches that drift.
The right response is not to slow the agents down. It is to give them a ground truth they cannot rewrite.
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If it prompts an argument about whether your tests are verifying intent or just recording behaviour, it has done its job. If you'd rather have that argument with someone who has settled it before, book a free QA consultation - we do this work embedded alongside your engineers, so the specification discipline stays in-house after we leave.