Spec first: spec-driven development for SAP ABAP

AI coding agents can generate ABAP in minutes, but without a spec, the next developer has no record of why the code was built that way. Most ABAP teams today use vibe coding to write and modernize SAP ABAP code. You get results faster, but the development decisions behind the code are lost, making it harder to modify when requirements change. SAP ABAP teams at customers who are still running SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) face growing pressure to review and modernize custom code before upgrading to RISE with SAP. ABAP code remains long after the developers who wrote it have moved on to other roles, with documentation that is either missing or outdated. Following the same vibe-coding approach to modernize ABAP adds more undocumented code, with no record of what was changed and why. In this post, we show you how spec-driven development (SDD) works for ABAP, what goes into a good ABAP spec, and how the spec stays useful even after the transport is released. Our examples use AWS Coding Plugin for SAP ABAP, which runs on Kiro CLI, the command line interface for Kiro, an agentic development environment from AWS. To learn what the plugin does and how to install it, refer to Introducing A...