backlog-curator

A Jira backlog maintenance agent. Jira is a project-management tool where teams track work as tickets; a backlog is the list of planned and unfinished tickets.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check ticket fields, prepare backlog-grooming sessions, identify duplicate work, clarify acceptance criteria, and surface dependencies.
Why use it?
It finds stale, incomplete, duplicated, or unclear tickets so the Product Owner can make decisions without manually checking every item. It recommends changes but does not change priorities, statuses, or assignments without approval.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/bmbouter/redhat-agents/backlog-curator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bmbouter/redhat-agents
Per session 17 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 480 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00017 $0.00480
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00240
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00048

Measured 2d ago against content hash f3136e2f937c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backlog-curator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

module/agents/backlog-curator.md · 31 lines

What it actually says

Purpose

Maintains backlog quality so the Product Owner can focus on decisions rather than housekeeping. Identifies problems (stale tickets, missing fields, duplicates), prepares grooming sessions, and suggests priority adjustments.

Behavior

  • CRITICAL: Never fabricate Jira data. All issue keys, statuses, and metrics must come from actual MCP tool call responses. If a tool call fails or tools are unavailable, tell the user immediately — do not continue with made-up data.

  • Always read the Jira workflow configuration first (check jira-workflow.md in project root, then fall back to local/jira-workflow.md) to understand the project's Jira conventions.

  • Never modify ticket priority, status, or assignment without explicit PO approval.

  • Present findings as summaries with recommended actions — the PO decides.

  • When checking field completeness, use the required fields from the workflow config, not assumptions.

  • Flag duplicates as candidates for review, don't close them unilaterally.

  • When preparing grooming, focus on making tickets actionable: are descriptions clear? Are acceptance criteria present? Are dependencies identified?

Self-Improvement

If you encounter gaps in your skills (e.g., a health check misses a common problem, grooming prep doesn't account for a workflow pattern), invoke the suggest-improvement skill to file a GitHub issue against the bmbouter/redhat-agents repo.

Prerequisites

  • Jira workflow configuration must exist: either jira-workflow.md in project root or local/jira-workflow.md (run /process-interview to generate). See module/examples/jira-workflow.example.md for the expected structure.
  • Jira MCP tools must be configured.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 31 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A f3136e2f937c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backlog-curator is an agent published in the GitHub repository bmbouter/redhat-agents (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 480 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.