BMAD Phase Orchestration

BMAD Phase Orchestration

The 4 BMAD Phases

BMAD projects follow a strict four-phase lifecycle. Each phase has a primary agent, required artifacts, and a gate that must be satisfied before the next phase begins.

Phase 1: Analysis

• Agent: mary-analyst
• Purpose: Understand the problem space, target users, market landscape, and project constraints
• Artifacts: docs/brief.md
• Activities: Stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis, user research synthesis, problem framing
• Gate: docs/brief.md must contain a substantive project brief with problem statement, target audience, and key features

Phase 2: Planning

• Agent: john-pm (with sally-ux for UX-heavy projects)
• Purpose: Translate analysis into a structured product plan with epics, stories, and priorities
• Artifacts: docs/prd.md
• Activities: Feature prioritization, epic decomposition, MVP scoping, requirement specification
• Gate: docs/prd.md must contain at least one epic with defined stories

Phase 3: Solutioning

• Agent: winston-architect
• Purpose: Design the technical architecture that satisfies the PRD requirements
• Artifacts: docs/architecture/index.md and supporting docs
• Activities: Tech stack selection, system design, API design, data modeling, security planning
• Gate: docs/architecture/index.md must exist with architecture overview and tech decisions

Phase 4: Implementation

• Agents: bob-sm (coordination), james-dev (coding), quinn-qa (testing)
• Purpose: Build the product story-by-story with continuous QA
• Artifacts: docs/stories/*.md and source code
• Activities: Story creation, development, code review, QA validation, bug fixing
• Gate: All stories reach "QA Pass" status

The 9 BMAD Agents

Phase Gates

Phase gates prevent premature advancement. A phase gate checks:

1. Artifact existence: The required files must exist
2. Content quality: Files must contain substantive content (not just placeholders)
3. Completeness: Key sections must be populated (e.g., PRD must have at least one epic)

Gates are enforced in /bmad-sprint and should be checked manually when working phase-by-phase.

Agent Handoff Patterns

When one phase completes and the next begins:

1. The completing agent summarizes its work and key decisions
2. The phase transition is logged to .bmad/phase-log.json
3. .bmad/config.json is updated with new phase status
4. The next agent reads all prior artifacts as input context
5. The next agent begins its phase-specific work

Key handoff data flows:

• Analysis → Planning: Brief informs epic structure and feature priorities
• Planning → Solutioning: PRD requirements drive architecture decisions
• Solutioning → Implementation: Architecture docs are extracted into story Dev Notes
• Within Implementation: Story results feed into subsequent story context

Quick Flow vs Full BMAD

Use barry-quick (Quick Flow) when:

• The task is small and well-defined (< 1 day of work)
• No cross-cutting architecture decisions are needed
• The user wants a rapid prototype or proof-of-concept
• The change is isolated to a single component

Use full BMAD when:

• The project is greenfield or involves significant new architecture
• Multiple stakeholders need alignment
• Quality gates and QA validation are important
• The work spans multiple epics or stories

Cowork Team Coordination

BMAD leverages the Cowork framework for multi-agent coordination:

• SendMessage: Agents communicate context, handoffs, and blockers
• TaskCreate / TaskUpdate: Work items are tracked as tasks with ownership
• Agent tool: Spawns specialized agents for phase execution
• Agents share the project filesystem as the source of truth — artifacts in docs/ are the coordination mechanism