Running a cycle with agents

This guide walks a team through one cycle of work with agents, from planning it to closing it. By the end you’ll know how much to put in a cycle, how to start its tickets, what to do each day while they run, and what happens to the work that isn’t finished.

A cycle is a time-boxed stretch of work, like a sprint. With agents doing the building, a cycle works a little differently: building is rarely what holds a ticket up. Your team’s attention is, because every plan needs agreeing, every question needs answering and every pull request needs a review. So you plan a cycle around what your team can review, not around what it could build.

Set the cadence once

Cycles are switched on per project, in Settings›, then This project›, then Cycles. Turn on Use cycles and set the Cadence: the Duration (one to eight weeks), the day each cycle Starts on, an optional Cooldown between cycles, and how many Upcoming cycles kept ahead. By Dawn schedules the cycles from then on, so there’s nothing to create by hand. A change to the cadence applies to upcoming cycles, never the one that’s running. Cycles lists every setting, including the automations.

The billing team from Intro to By Dawn runs two-week cycles starting on Monday, with no cooldown.

If your team estimates, choose a Scale in Settings›, then This project›, then Estimates, such as Fibonacci or T-shirt sizes. Each ticket then has an Estimate, and the planner measures the cycle in points rather than tickets. See Estimates.

Plan the cycle

On Friday, Maya opens Cycles & Releases in the sidebar (⌘5) and chooses Plan next cycle. The planner shows the Backlog on one side and the cycle on the other. She filters the backlog by epic, picks tickets, and chooses Add to Cycle 14, or drags them across.

The Capacity bar above the cycle compares what she’s planned with the team’s velocity over its last completed cycles, and says Over capacity or Within capacity. In a project’s first cycle there’s no velocity yet, so the bar fills in once a cycle has completed. Plan a cycle covers the planner in full.

Velocity tells you what the team got through, which includes the reviewing. A few things are worth weighing on top of it:

• Count the reviews, not the builds. An agent can build ten tickets in a day. Plan only as many as your team can read plans for and review in a day.
• Leave room for what comes back. Some tickets come back from review with a note, and each one costs another review.
• Put the blocking work first. A ticket that blocks three others is worth more early in the cycle than late.
• Prefer finished epics to started ones. Taking the whole of the team invoices epic from Planning a feature as an epic beats a third of three epics.

A ticket can also join a cycle from anywhere: its Add to cycle picker (⌘⇧C), or Move to cycle with several tickets selected on the board.

Start the work

On Monday the cycle starts on its own. Maya has three ways to start its tickets:

• One at a time, from each ticket, when she wants to agree each one’s mode and mission.
• Launch epic, for the cycle’s epics. Each launch starts its ready tickets and keeps starting the rest as their blockers finish, with Max at once keeping the number running at a time in check.
• Run cycle, on the cycle’s page, which starts every ready ticket in the cycle in one go: ones nobody has started, with no open blocker. It’s off until a project admin turns on Allow Run cycle in the project’s cycle settings, and it starts at most 20 at a time.

How many agents can actually run at once depends on your machines and your plan. Each machine that runs agents has a number of Parallel jobs, set in the Remote Agents section of your organization’s settings, and your plan caps the total across the organization. A ticket that’s started when every machine is busy waits its turn, so it’s safe to start more than can run. Remote agents and machines shows where to set a machine’s parallel jobs.

Maya launches the team invoices epic with Max at once set to 3, and starts the two small fixes one at a time.

Each day

Most of a cycle with agents is a short daily pass through what’s waiting on you. Maya starts her day with the bell in the title bar, her Inbox. Its Needs you list has everything waiting on her: plans to approve, questions an agent asked, and other checkpoints. Updates below it has what she should know but needn’t act on, such as finished work and mentions. The board’s Needs you view shows the same tickets on the board.

Her pass takes the same order every day:

1. Answer questions first. An agent waiting on an answer is doing nothing, and an answer takes a minute.
2. Agree plans next. A plan she approves this morning is code she can review this afternoon.
3. Review what’s in Review. See Reviewing agent work.

A card in the Running column that reads Held at Get CI green, or at another step, isn’t stuck. The agent has finished, and By Dawn is waiting on that step, such as CI, before it moves on.

To see how the cycle is going, she opens it from Cycles & Releases. The header counts its tickets by scope, started and completed, and the Burn-up tab shows completed work rising towards the scope. Breakdown splits it by assignee, epic, label or priority. If she has the morning briefing turned on, it says whether the cycle is ahead of pace, on pace or behind pace.

Close the cycle

A cycle closes at the end of its last day. Unfinished tickets move into the next cycle, because Roll over unfinished tickets is on unless a project admin turns it off. A carried-over ticket’s card says how many times it has moved, such as ↻×2, so a ticket that keeps rolling over is easy to spot. It usually needs splitting, a better ticket, or a decision rather than more time.

To close early, choose Complete now on the cycle’s page. By Dawn says how many unfinished tickets will move, and where, before you choose Complete cycle.

Once a cycle has completed, its Report tab shows the scope, what was completed, what rolled over, and what was added and removed during the cycle. Maya reads it with the team before planning the next one, and asks one question: was review the limit this time? If it was, the next cycle gets fewer tickets, not more agents. When a cycle ends covers closing a cycle that feeds a release.

Do and don’t

Do:

• Plan for the reviews your team can do, and let velocity tell you whether you got it right.
• Answer agents’ questions before anything else each day.
• Look at every ticket that has rolled over twice before you plan the next cycle.

Don’t:

• Fill the cycle because the agents are fast. Unreviewed work in Review isn’t done.
• Start every ticket on the first morning if the plans will wait days for approval.

Where to go next

• Reviewing agent work: the review at the end of every ticket.
• Writing tickets an agent can finish: fewer questions and fewer send-backs make a cycle go further.