Understanding Work Item compose agent

Edit online

The Work Item compose agent helps you create high‑quality work‑item descriptions and acceptance criteria by using dedicated prompts for selected work‑item types and attributes that are a part of the predefined Scrum, SAFe, Formal, and IBM ELM Automotive Compliance templates.

Supported work item types

The AI-assisted Work Item compose is available for the following attributes:


Work Item type	Attribute IDs
Epic	Description
Portfolio Epic	Epic hypothesis statement Description Success criteria
Solution Epic	Epic hypothesis statement Description Success criteria
Solution Train Epic	Epic hypothesis statement Description Success criteria
Capability	Benefit hypothesis (Description) Acceptance criteria
ART Epic	Epic hypothesis statement Description Success criteria
Program Epic	Epic hypothesis statement Description Success criteria
Feature	Benefit hypothesis (Description) Acceptance criteria
Story	Description Acceptance criteria

Sources of information for content creation

The Work Item compose agent generates content using a combination of the information it gets from the work items system-defined attributes, such as summary, description, state, etc., along with the custom attributes.

Note: The agent uses data from select attribute types, such as: Boolean, Contributor, Decimal, Deliverable, Duration, Enumeration, Integer, Large String, Long, Medium String, Small String, Timestamp, Category, Iteration (proposed), HTML (Large and Medium).

Additionally, the agent also uses information data from linked:

Work Items: The description and acceptance criteria of work items associated using the link types:
- Parent
- Contributes-to
Requirements: The name, primary text, and artifact type of DOORS Next requirements associated using the link types:
- Implements Requirement
- Tracks Requirement

This combined dataset enables richer, context-aware generation of work item descriptions and acceptance criteria

Generated content structure

The Work Item Compose agent creates well‑structured content for work‑item attributes, tailored to the selected work‑item type and planning level.

Note: The agent use dedicated prompts optimized for each work item type.

The agent is best suited to compose high-quality starting points of work items before downstream work begins. In several cases, Work Item compose improves the quality of details already available for planning and development by organizing content into appropriate section, rewording to improve clarity and remove redundant information, and be more consistent with best practices recommended for the particular work item type

Important: Content generated by the Work Item compose agent is marked as "AI-generated" to indicate that it should be reviewed for accuracy. All AI-generated content should be reviewed for accuracy before finalizing work items

Tips for effective use

The quality of generated content depends on the context you provide. Include relevant details about requirements, objectives, and constraints.
Always review AI-generated content for accuracy, completeness, and alignment with your project requirements.
Use the generated content as a starting point and refine it to match your specific needs and terminology.
If the initial generated content doesn't meet your needs, you can regenerate or manually edit the content.

Note: It is possible that the agent hallucinates based on limited context.