Refine Ticket

Refine Ticket

Move a ticket from "raw idea" to "implementation-ready" in one run. Produces a rewritten ticket, Top-5 risks, and persona voices. Orchestrates validate-feature-fit and threat-modeling as sub-skills — never duplicates their logic. Output is copy-paste ready; the user decides write-back.

When to use

• The user hands over a Jira / Linear ticket key, URL, branch name, or pasted ticket text and asks for a sanity check before planning.
• A ticket looks too vague, too broad, or smells wrong.
• Before /feature-plan or /feature-explore on a ticket-anchored scope.
• The user says "tighten the AC", "poke holes in this ticket", "is this ready to plan?", "ist das Ticket klar genug?", "verbessere das Ticket".

When NOT to use (near-misses)

/refine-ticket orchestrates these — it does not replace them.

Language strategy

The refined output's prose language is picked once, up front, and applied to every section (refined description, risks, persona voices, orchestration notes, close-prompt). Fallback order — first hit wins:

1. User-message language. If the latest user message is in German, the entire output is German; if English, English; etc. This honours the global language-and-tone iron law.
2. Ticket body language. When the user's message is ambiguous (one-word /refine-ticket PROJ-123), mirror the language the ticket is written in — detected from the summary + description.
3. .agent-settings.yml default. If both are silent or unclear, fall back to the project default in .agent-settings.yml (personal.language or equivalent). If that is also missing, default to English.

Quoted identifiers (ticket keys, file paths, command names, code snippets) stay in their native form. Only the prose mirrors the selected language.

Inputs (four equivalent paths)

Reuses the jira-ticket command's loader. Accepts:

1. Ticket key — /refine-ticket PROJ-123
2. Branch detection — /refine-ticket with no arg; regex [A-Z]+-[0-9]+ against git branch --show-current
3. Pasted text — /refine-ticket followed by a markdown block
4. URL — /refine-ticket https://acme.atlassian.net/browse/PROJ-123

If none resolve to a ticket, fall back to conversational discovery (feature-explore-style): ask one focused question, then continue.

Procedure

1. Load ticket

Delegate to jira-ticket §1-3:

• Extract ticket ID (branch / URL / arg).
• Fetch via Jira API (GET /issue/{id}) — summary, description, issue type, priority, status, comments, linked issues.
• Scan description + comments for Sentry URLs; pull stacktrace / tags when present.

If pasted text: skip API, parse markdown, extract title + AC bullets + body.

Auto-fetch parent (Phase F4). Before detection, check the issue type and fold parent context in:

import { issuetype_needs_parent, fold_parent_context } from 'scripts/refine_ticket_detect.js';

if (issuetype_needs_parent(ticket.issuetype)) {
    const parentKey = ticket.parent_key;        // from `fields.parent.key`
    const parent = fetch_jira_issue(parentKey); // +1 API call
    ticketBody = fold_parent_context(ticketBody, parent.body, parentKey);
}

Rules:

• Applies to Story and Sub-task (and their Linear / Shortcut equivalents). Task / Bug / Epic skip the auto-fetch unless a parent link field is already populated — in that case the agent folds explicitly without the issuetype guard.
• fold_parent_context() is idempotent; folding twice with the same parent does not duplicate the block.
• When the parent fetch fails (404, permission, network), skip the fold and append a line to orchestration notes: "Parent <key> not reachable — AC may lack upstream context."

Parent AC lines surfaced this way must be cited verbatim in the refined output's Open questions section so the user sees which constraints come from the parent.

2. Inspect ticket + detect orchestration triggers

Check the loaded ticket for clarity signals before orchestrating:

• Does the summary match the description body?
• Are AC bullets concrete (observable / testable) or vague ("works well")?
• Is the scope one feature, or multiple tangled together?
• Any sentence that references an existing module name, feature flag, or domain concept?

Cross-source discrepancy scan (per cross-source-consistency, gated by consistency.cross_source): the ticket is rarely a single source. Compare every source against the others and surface any conflict as an Open question — never resolve it silently:

• text ↔ attachment — does the ticket text agree with every attached mockup / screenshot / diagram? (Canonical miss: text says "birthdays today", the mockup shows a birthday from two days ago.) If an attachment cannot be read, say so — do not assume it agrees.
• silent-but-needed — is the spec silent on a clearly-needed behavior (weekend/holiday shift, empty state, error path, timezone, permissions)? Surface it and ask before it becomes an implementation assumption — an inferred behavior is a scope expansion, not a given.
• intra-ticket — do the AC, description, and comments contradict each other?

Fold every discrepancy into the refined output's Open questions section (one batched list), never a second prompt. Full taxonomy + scan procedure: cross-source-consistency-mechanics.

Then run the deterministic detection helper — do not re-derive trigger logic in prose:

./agent-config refine-ticket:detect <ticket-body-file>
# or, inside the skill run (scripts/refine_ticket_detect.ts):
#   import { detect, load_map } from 'scripts/refine_ticket_detect.js';
#   const decision = detect(ticketBody, load_map(), process.cwd());

The helper consumes detection-map.yml (co-located in this skill folder) and returns:

• validate-feature-fit — fires when ≥ 2 distinct feature-area keywords appear in the body (see sub_skills.validate-feature-fit.keywords).
• threat-modeling — fires on any auth / webhook / upload / queue / secret / tenant / admin / PII / payment keyword, or a CVE-YYYY-N regex match.
• repo_aware — on when .git/, agents/settings/contexts/, composer.json, or package.json is present in the cwd; off otherwise.
• When repo_aware=True, decision.repo_context is populated by gather_repo_context():
  • recent_branches — up to 20 most recent local branches (naming convention signal).
  • recent_commits — up to 30 most recent commit subjects (active modules + verb conventions).
  • context_docs — every agents/settings/contexts/*.md filename (domain vocabulary).
• Outside a repo the context is empty — the skill produces the same output shape, minus repo-specific citations (graceful degrade).

Use repo_context.recent_branches to anchor the "Refined ticket" title naming (e.g. feat/ vs fix/ vs refactor/ prefix), and repo_context.context_docs to cite domain vocabulary in the Top-5 risks instead of inventing terms.

The match lists and require_count thresholds are owned by detection-map.yml — edit the map, not this skill (DE + EN fixtures, repo-aware + graceful-degrade coverage are regression-locked in this package's own test suite).

3. Orchestrate

For every SubSkillDecision with fired=True, invoke the named sub-skill with the ticket body as input:

• validate-feature-fit → returns duplicate / scope-creep findings
• threat-modeling → returns trust boundaries + abuse cases

Cite, don't copy — the output references findings by sub-skill name and file:line where applicable. If a sub-skill reports zero findings, emit fired → clean in the orchestration section. Skipped sub-skills appear as skipped (no trigger match) — never silently omitted.

Each fired finding must map to at least one entry in the Top-5 risks section; orchestration that does not influence the risks is waste.

4. Apply personas

Load the persona set from frontmatter (Core-6 default). Each persona reviews the ticket through its lens and produces one paragraph:

• Developer — implementability, unknowns, test seams
• Senior Engineer — architectural fit, blast radius, hidden deps
• Product Owner — value, user story integrity, AC completeness
• Stakeholder — deadline fit, business impact, comms plan
• Critical Challenger — devil's advocate; what's wrong with this?
• AI Agent — automation hooks, tool boundaries, clarity for agents

Optional: --personas=+qa adds the QA persona (edge cases, regression risk, test matrix).

Optional: --user-type=<id> loads one user-type from user-types/<id>.md and adds an end-user simulation lens to the persona stack (e.g. --user-type=galabau-field-crew). User-types compose orthogonally with personas — persona = methodology / role lens; user-type = end-user / field lens. v1 is CLI-only (no skill-level default; no frontmatter list). The user-type voice renders as one paragraph in Persona voices labelled **User: <label>**, citing Daily Workflow, Vocabulary, Operational Constraints, and Ticket Red Flags from the loaded user-type. Contract: docs/contracts/user-type-schema.md.

5. Synthesize + close-prompt

Produce the three-section output (template below). After rendering, emit the close-prompt (below). Do not write to Jira. Do not open a planning doc.

Output template

Frozen per Q25.

## Refined ticket

**Title:** <rewritten title>

<rewritten description — tightened AC, explicit out-of-scope,
open questions surfaced>

## Top-5 risks

1. <risk> — <mitigation / deferral>
2. <risk> — <mitigation / deferral>
3. <risk> — <mitigation / deferral>
4. <risk> — <mitigation / deferral>
5. <risk> — <mitigation / deferral>

## Persona voices

- **Developer** — <one paragraph>
- **Senior Engineer** — <one paragraph>
- **Product Owner** — <one paragraph>
- **Stakeholder** — <one paragraph>
- **Critical Challenger** — <one paragraph>
- **AI Agent** — <one paragraph>
- **[qa]** — *(only when `--personas=+qa`)* <one paragraph>
- **User: <label>** — *(only when `--user-type=<id>`)* <one paragraph
  citing Daily Workflow / Vocabulary / Operational Constraints /
  Ticket Red Flags from the loaded user-type>

## Orchestration notes

- `validate-feature-fit` — <fired / skipped; key findings or "clean">
- `threat-modeling` — <fired / skipped; key findings or "clean">
- Repo-aware — <on / off; contexts loaded>

The "Refined ticket" section is wrapped in a copyable Markdown box so the user can grab it verbatim.

Self-review (3-scan checklist)

Run these three scans on the rendered output before the close-prompt. Each is a fast pass; failure blocks emission and forces a fix.

1. Spec coverage — every AC bullet and constraint from the original ticket (and every parent-AC line surfaced via fold_parent_context) is reflected in the rewritten ticket, the Top-5 risks, or the Open questions section. Nothing from the input vanishes silently.
2. Placeholder / TODO scan — no <placeholder>, TODO, FIXME, tbd, ???, XXX strings remain. The angle-bracket placeholders in the template (<rewritten title>, <risk>, <one paragraph>) must be replaced with concrete prose before the close-prompt fires.
3. Type / shape consistency — every module, file, route, or domain term cited in the rewritten ticket and Top-5 risks matches repo_context.context_docs and recent_branches vocabulary. Invented terms are flagged in Open questions or replaced with the project's actual term.

Self-review is mechanical (gaps, leftovers, naming drift); persona voices and orchestration outputs handle reasoning critique. Both run; neither replaces the other.

Source: adapted from an external reference.

Close-prompt (mandatory final step)

Probe write access first (Phase F6). Before rendering, do a cheap upfront check:

import { render_close_prompt } from 'scripts/refine_ticket_detect.js';

let write: boolean | null;
try {
    const me = jira_get('/myself');                 // existence → auth works
    const meta = jira_get(`/issue/${key}/editmeta`); // fields → write access
    write = Boolean(meta.fields);
} catch {
    write = null;                                    // probe itself failed
}

console.log(render_close_prompt(write));

Behaviour:

Per user interaction rules, accept number or free text. editmeta is cheap and cacheable; cache the result per Jira project key for the session, re-probe on project change.

Rubric pass (optional, surfacing-only)

After refinement, run judge-artifact-completeness with rubric ticket-quality-score to verify DoR readiness — acceptance criteria, test plan, risk, and estimate. Invoke when the user asks for a DoR check — not automatically on every refinement.

Output format

1. Refined ticket section with rewritten title + description, wrapped in a copyable markdown block.
2. Top-5 risks as a numbered list, each item paired with a mitigation or deferral.
3. Persona voices — one paragraph per persona from the active set; no skipped personas without explicit reason.
4. Orchestration notes naming every sub-skill that fired or was skipped, with a one-line reason.
5. Close-prompt with exactly three numbered options (comment / replace / nothing); no fourth option in v1.

Gotcha

• The model tends to invent risks that sound plausible but aren't anchored in the ticket text. Every risk in Top-5 must cite a phrase, AC bullet, or sub-skill finding — no hypotheticals.
• Persona voices degrade into generic platitudes when the ticket is already tight. If a persona has nothing real to flag, write one sentence stating that — do not pad.
• Sub-skills (validate-feature-fit, threat-modeling) cost tokens; orchestrate only when the trigger matrix actually matches, not defensively on every run.
• Branch-detection matches the first [A-Z]+-[0-9]+ in the branch name; chained keys (e.g. feat/PROJ-1-and-PROJ-2) pick the first and note the rest.

Do NOT

• Do NOT write back to Jira in v1 — output is copyable markdown; write-back is user-gated via the close-prompt.
• Do NOT chain into /estimate-ticket or /feature-plan automatically — separate invocations by design (Q5 decision).
• Do NOT duplicate logic from validate-feature-fit or threat-modeling — orchestrate by reference, cite findings, don't re-derive them.
• Do NOT skip the close-prompt, even when the ticket looks fine and the user seems eager to move on — the prompt is the contract.
• Do NOT emit persona voices outside the active set; if the user passed --personas=+qa, add QA, otherwise do not.
• Do NOT emit a user-type voice unless --user-type=<id> was passed; loading a user-type proactively (e.g. "this ticket smells like field-crew") is forbidden — the axis is CLI-only in v1.

See also

• jira-ticket — ticket loader
• validate-feature-fit — orchestrated sub-skill
• threat-modeling — orchestrated sub-skill
• feature-explore — upstream idea capture; hints at /refine-ticket when input looks like a ticket
• feature-plan — downstream planning
• adversarial-review — same critical-challenger persona, different stage (post-plan)
• artifact-drafting-protocol — this skill was drafted under it