Machine readable specifications at scale

There are lots of potential uses for machine readable specifications so you would think that every major real world artifact like long-lived hardware and software systems, protocols, languages, etc. would have a formal specification that is used by all teams extending, implementing, testing, verifying or securing the design. But, in practice, this is usually not true: most real world systems do not have a well tested, up to date, machine readable specification.

This talk is about why you might want to change this and some things to consider as you go about it. In particular, it is about the use and creation of machine readable specifications at scale: when the number of engineers affected is counted in the thousands. This sort of scale leads to different problems and solutions than you would see in a 5–10 person project and both the challenges and the potential benefits are significantly larger.