I'm a PM looking to automate the creation of user stories and backlog grooming. I want to know if can effectively take a project charter and have a 'Scrum Master' agent and a 'Developer' agent negotiate the story points. Has anyone tried this kind of 'adversarial' agent collaboration yet?
3 answers
This is actually one of the coolest uses for . I set up a crew with a 'Product Owner' agent and a 'Senior Dev' agent in late 2023. The PO creates the initial story, and the Dev agent is tasked with finding technical gaps. They go back and forth for 2 iterations. The result is a much more comprehensive Jira ticket than what a human could write in ten minutes. The key is to give the Dev agent a very "skeptical" backstory so it actually challenges the PO agent's assumptions during the planning process.
How do you handle the final approval? Does a human have to step in and 'sign off' on the story points, or do you let the agents decide the final velocity for the sprint?
I tried this but found the agents were way too optimistic about story points. They estimated a complex API integration as a 3-pointer! Definitely needs a reality check.
Haha, classic AI optimism! I find that giving the agent a "Pessimistic Architect" persona helps ground those estimates in reality a bit more.
I always keep a human in the loop. The agents provide the draft and the "reasoning" for the points, but I have a final script that requires a manual 'Y' or 'N' before it hits our Jira API.