p4-plan-backlog-refinement

A guide for refining a product backlog, the ordered list of work that has not yet been scheduled. It covers user stories, smaller tasks, priorities, and estimates in points or days.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during backlog meetings to find, create, arrange, prioritize, estimate, and add acceptance criteria to work items in P4 Plan.
Why use it?
It gives teams a consistent way to clarify upcoming work, break it into tasks, and decide what should be done first.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/perforce/p4plan-mcp/backlog-refinement
Any agent
npx skills add perforce/p4plan-mcp --skill backlog-refinement
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/perforce/p4plan-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 535 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 $0.00043 $0.00535
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00267
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00107
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00053

Measured 2d ago against content hash a5fb059262aa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

p4-plan-backlog-refinement 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.

skills/backlog-refinement/SKILL.md · 40 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 40 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Backlog refinement in P4 Plan

The Product Backlog is a dedicated section containing user stories and tasks not yet scheduled into sprints.

Key Concepts

  • User Story: High-level feature/epic in the backlog. Can have children (sub-stories or tasks).
  • Backlog Item (BacklogTask): Actionable work task. Leaf-level work.
  • Backlog priority: Relative ordering. Values: veryHigh, high, medium, low, veryLow, none
  • Points: Story point estimates (numeric).
  • Estimated days: Day-based estimates (alternative to points).

Tool Mapping

User Intent Tool Key Parameters
Find backlog items search_tasks findQuery, projectId
Create a backlog item create_item type: "backlog_task", projectId, name
Create a sub-task create_item type: "backlog_task", projectId, name, parentItemId
Insert after an item create_item type: "backlog_task", projectId, name, previousItemId
Set priority update_item itemId, priority
Estimate in points update_item itemId, points
Estimate in days update_item itemId, estimatedDays
Get full item details get_tasks taskIds
Add acceptance criteria post_comment taskId, text
Move item to sprint commit_to_sprint taskId, sprintId

Committed Items

Items with a committedToProjectID are already committed to a sprint. Before modifying, moving, or breaking down committed items, always confirm with the user first. When creating sub-tasks under a committed parent (parentItemId), call get_tasks on the parent first — if it has committedToProjectID, ask the user whether the sub-items should be created in the sprint or in the backlog.

Read the full file on GitHub · 40 lines

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 · 40 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A a5fb059262aa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

p4-plan-backlog-refinement is a skill published in the GitHub repository perforce/p4plan-mcp (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 535 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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