Most backlogs are full of tickets that are clear enough to build but never get picked up. An AI agent can take those tickets from the backlog to a merged pull request, as long as the work is split into steps you can check. This guide walks through those steps in plain language.
Start with a ticket an agent can finish
A good first ticket has a clear outcome, a small scope and a way to tell it worked. "Add an export button to the orders page" works. "Improve performance" does not. If a person on your team could finish the ticket in a day without asking questions, an agent probably can too.
Before you hand a ticket over, check three things: the description says what done looks like, the affected area of the code is named or easy to find, and any tests that should pass are listed.
The five steps
- Read: the agent reads the ticket, the linked pages and the relevant parts of the repository.
- Plan: it writes down what it will change and which tests it will add. This plan is short enough for a person to read in a minute.
- Build: it makes the change on its own branch, runs the tests and fixes what fails.
- Review: a second agent reads the pull request the way a teammate would and leaves comments. The first agent answers them.
- Merge: once checks pass and the people you named have approved, the pull request is merged and the ticket moves on.
Keep every step visible
The ticket should show what happened: the plan as a comment, a link to the pull request, and a note when the agent is stuck. Your team should never have to ask "where is this?". If the status lives only in a chat window, it will be lost.
What to review as a person
You do not need to read every line the agent wrote at the start, but you do need to decide where a person looks. Most teams start by reading the plan and the pull request, then relax the plan check once the agent has earned trust on that kind of ticket. The guide on choosing which steps need approval covers this in detail.
Common reasons a ticket stalls
- The description leaves out the acceptance criteria, so the agent guesses.
- The ticket mixes two jobs. Split it into two tickets.
- The tests are slow or flaky, so the agent cannot tell whether its change works.
- Nobody was named as the approver, so the pull request waits.
Fix these in the backlog and the agent's success rate goes up without any change to the agent.