We are happy to announce that we have released a new update for SpecSync v5 that significantly improves the synchronization performance. The new version (v5.4) is a compatible update for v5 according to our new semantic versioning policy, which means that you can use your existing SpecSync v5 configuration with the new version – no migration process is needed.
Improved synchronization performance
The most important improvement in this release is the improved synchronization performance. With this new improvement, the synchronization time will be drastically faster. In our measurements, the synchronization time has become 5-13 times faster on local execution and 3-5 times faster on CI. Our pilot customers 🙏 for this improvement have confirmed the performance improvement to be in the same range.
For example the BDD scenarios of SpecSync itself were synchronized in 1 minute locally and it has been now dropped to 5.4 seconds! On our Azure pipeline (windows-2022 image), the synchronization time dropped to 11 seconds.
This improvement is an important milestone, with the v5 product line we have started a modernization process. The flagship feature of v5, the test suite hierarchy synchronization required to process up to 200-300 test suites for a larger project and ensuring that several thousands of test cases are all in the right place. We have developed an improved, parallel processing infrastructure to handle this load with the goal that it can be later also used for test case synchronization as well, this is what we are presenting now in this update.
The change improves the performance of push and pull synchronization commands, but we are planning to apply the same approach for publish-test-results command in one of the upcoming updates. The improvement is effective for both SpecSync for Azure DevOps and SpecSync for Jira.
Improved security and fixes for pull operation
We are continually monitoring the security-related announcements for the dependencies used by SpecSync and update them as quickly as possible. Although so far none of the discovered security vulnerabilities have directly affected SpecSync, we always recommend to upgrade to the latest actively supported update release (latest v5.* or latest v3.4.*) to keep your development process safe. This release (and the related update v3.4.34) also contains updates to some dependencies that were involved in security announcements.
The update also contains a few fixes related to the pull synchronization command to address minor issues for pulling special scenarios.
Please find the complete change log at https://docs.specsolutions.eu/specsync/changelog#v5.4.0-2026-04-20
More than a decade
The first version of SpecSync was released in February 2016, more than a decade ago. Please let us take the moment to thank you all for staying with us in the exciting journey of this product. For us this product is not only a tool which solves a synchronization task, but a concept that can help to improve trust, transparency, the traceability of BDD and test automation in general.
You might have heard that with Seb Rose we are working on a new and extended edition of our BDD book, published by Manning: Effective Behavior-Driven Development (in preview). The “Automation” part of the book contains several BDD automation patterns that have been proven to help SpecSync itself over the last 10 years.
We love to hear your stories
I hope this update will improve your SpecSync experience. Please don’t hesitate to share your feedback: we would love to hear your improved statistics, but also about any further improvements or suggestions we should focus on. Please feel free to reply to this email to share your feedback or to ask for an online session.
Happy synching!
