Your life cycle was designed for humans writing code.
The SDLC rested on two assumptions: a person writes the change, and a person keeps the plan up to date. Agents break both at once. They ship faster than anyone updates a ticket, and they build exactly what the criteria say, no more. The Agentic Development Life Cycle needs a control layer the SDLC never had.
- A developer writes the change
- Someone remembers to move the ticket
- "Done" means a human said so
- Review is the only gate
- Status is gathered by asking people
- Agents write most of the change
- Nothing keeps pace with agent output
- "Done" must be machine-verifiable
- The gate has to run on every pull request
- Status has to be read from ground truth
GroundTruth is that control layer.
It writes acceptance criteria an agent can be held to, verifies what actually shipped against them, keeps every tracker true without anyone updating a ticket, and signs each automated change into a chain you can prove and undo.
Six stages, measured by the question you can answer.
Not a capability ladder. Capability is easy to buy and tells you very little. What actually separates these stages is whether you could answer the question today, if somebody asked.
Individuals adopt agents because they are obviously useful. Nobody decided this centrally, and nobody needs to.
What breaks nextThree teams end up on three tools. The good prompts live in someone’s DMs.
Enough usage that people share what works. Still no owner, still no register, and the answer changes depending who you ask.
What breaks nextThe useful automation turns out to live on one laptop, and dies when that person takes a week off.
Automations are hosted properly and fire on a schedule. Output volume climbs sharply and the review queue starts to lengthen.
What breaks nextMerges outrun the tracker. The board becomes a description of last week.
Every agent has its own scoped identity and every change carries a chain back to the intent and the human accountable for it.
What breaks nextYou can prove what happened, and still not know whether it was right.
Done means the acceptance criteria were met and checked, not that someone moved a card. Ambiguous cases route to a person.
What breaks nextNothing. This is where most organisations should stop and consolidate.
Agents handle the routine within bounds that are enforced rather than requested. People spend their attention on the cases that actually need it.
What breaks nextOnly reachable because 4 and 5 are true. Without them this is volume with no brakes.
Most organisations are at one or two, and the honest advice for them is not to skip ahead. Stages four and five are the ones that get more expensive the longer you leave them, because they depend on a record made at the time. Why that is.
Enterprise-grade from the first pull request.
Switch your life cycle without switching your tools, and without widening your attack surface.
Works with your stack
Jira, Linear, Azure DevOps and Asana on the tracker side. GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket as ground truth. One engine across all of them.
See the integrations →Zero-trust access
SSO via OIDC with SCIM provisioning, role and scope enforced on every request, least-privilege tokens you can revoke at any time, encrypted in transit and at rest, tenant-isolated. We never read or store your source code.
Provable by default
Every automated change is signed into a tamper-evident audit chain: what changed, why, on whose authority, and how to undo it. Built for the review you will eventually face.
Deploy where you must
Cloud by default. For regulated and defence environments, Enterprise offers self-hosted and air-gapped deployment that runs entirely inside your perimeter, with Jira Data Center and GitHub Enterprise Server support.
Talk to us about Enterprise →Human in command
Shadow mode proves it before it writes anything. Clear cases sync automatically, ambiguous ones go to a person, and any write can be reverted. Autonomy with a hand on the wheel.
What are you paying managers to chase status?
Priced against the manager time it frees, not against your tooling. See what it costs.
You're paying manager salaries to run a human polling loop.
Status lives in two systems
Work happens in GitHub. Status is reported in Jira. The only thing connecting them is a human remembering to update a ticket.
So managers chase status all week
PMs and TPMs spend hours DMing developers, then hand-copy it into a report that's already stale by Monday.
Developers get pulled out of flow
"What's the status of ABC-123?" Every interruption is a context switch that costs real engineering time.
Leadership decides on fiction
The weekly status report is built on self-reported data that drifted from reality days ago.
New in GroundTruth
The engine keeps growing. Here's what's new, all live, all built on the same ground-truth core.
GitLab & Bitbucket
Ground truth is no longer GitHub-only. Point GroundTruth at GitLab or Bitbucket too.
NewAC authoring assist
Scores your acceptance criteria, flags untestable language, and drafts a checklist we can gate on.
NewDefinition-of-Done check
A GitHub status check that blocks a merge when the PR is unlinked or its AC are unmet.
NewAsync standup
Per-person shipped / in-progress / blocked, assembled from ground truth and posted to Slack or Teams.
NewPortfolio roll-up
Initiative to epic to story health with true numbers, so the exec view stops being fiction.
Comparevs. native automation
Why a free merge rule isn't enough, and where the enforcement + proof layer begins.
Reads the whole chain, so “done” is never fuzzy.
GroundTruth reads your PRD, ERD, and execution plan alongside the codebase, then helps you write clear, testable acceptance criteria, and holds each ticket to them before it ever calls it done.
Get “done” right from day one.
Author acceptance criteria up front, tied to the PRD and ERD, so every ticket ships with an unambiguous, testable definition of done, no guesswork later.
Fix the backlog you already have.
Remediate vague or missing AC across your existing tickets, so GroundTruth can verify each against the code and auto-close only what is genuinely met.
Start with a brownfield backlog-cleanup pilot, the fee credits toward an annual plan.
Real screens, doing real work.
Status reports that write themselves.
Exec summary plus a Progress / Planned / Risks / Asks 2×2, built from what actually merged, not what someone remembered to type. Edit the framing, publish in a click.
On track. 6 shipped this week, 4 in flight, 1 risk to watch.
KAN-12 ingredients ✓
KAN-20 fondant
Spot blockers forming, before they block you.
GroundTruth reads each ticket's acceptance criteria against your real codebase and flags unmet criteria, cross-team dependencies, and stalled work as they form.
Automated, but never unaccountable.
Every write is signed into a tamper-evident chain, attributed to system or human, and reversible in one click. You can trust it, and you can prove it.
| Actor | Change | Mode | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| system | KAN-8 To Do → Done | live | applied |
| system | KAN-16 To Do → In Review | live | applied |
| you | KAN-16 In Review → In Progress | live | reverted |
A tour of GroundTruth.
Acceptance-criteria gate. Reads AC against your real code, so it never false-closes a ticket.
Auto-linking. Matches PRs to tickets by branch, title, or “Closes”, even when the dev forgot.
Command center. Drift, auto-resolution, and guarantee status at a glance.
Shadow mode. Watch it be right for a cycle before you let it write a single ticket.
Reports come to you. Weekly digest to Slack or email — nobody hand-assembles it.
Live in minutes. Connect GitHub + your tracker, flip shadow mode, and watch it work.
Scoped by team. Company → org → team → cross-org initiatives, with per-persona access.
Slippage radar. See tickets trending to miss, before they block the release.
GitHub is ground truth. Your tracker stays true.
One reconcile engine, four trackers. Read status, gate on acceptance criteria, and write the right state back, with a human in command.
Cloud + Data Center. Real transitions, AC-gated.
Workflow states set directly by the engine.
Work items via WIQL; System.State write-back.
Reads status; writes complete + a Status field. No native workflow states.
See the integration docs, or on a different tracker, tell us which one: the connector interface is the same shape for each.
Guarantees, not adjectives.
Every number below is written into your contract, make-good first, money back as the backstop.
Analytics tools measure your Jira. We make it true.
Every engineering-intelligence tool reads the same GitHub and Jira data and draws you a chart. None of them write back to keep Jira accurate, and none of them read your acceptance criteria against your code. GroundTruth does both, and proves every change.
Write-back to truth
We don't just observe drift, we close it. Jira reflects reality without anyone updating a ticket.
Acceptance criteria vs. code
The only tool that reads what the ticket requires against what the code actually does, to catch "looks done, isn't."
Provable by design
Every automated change is signed into a tamper-evident audit chain. Reversible, attributable, audit-ready.
Not a blind merge rule
A free automation flips the status on merge, right or wrong. We enforce the definition of done and prove it. See the difference →
We guarantee the things we control, and prove them.
Every guarantee's remedy is make-good first (we keep working it free until you hit the number), with a cash refund as the backstop. Guarantees apply to Standard and Pro.
Accuracy SLA
Your Jira matches your codebase within 15 minutes of a merge, 99%+ of the time. Or your money back.
B · Drift elimination
We cut your GitHub-to-Jira drift by 90% in 30 days. Or your money back.
C · Write safety
We never make a wrong change to your Jira. Every automated write is correct and provable in the audit chain. Or your money back.
D · Pays for itself
GroundTruth saves more than it costs. Or your money back.
E · Time-to-value
Connected and syncing within a day. Or your first month is free.
F · Reports write themselves
You never hand-assemble a status report again. Or your money back.
Automate the toil. Keep the judgment.
GroundTruth never runs wild in your Jira. A human is in command at every checkpoint, and every automated action is an audit checkpoint you can inspect, prove, and undo.
- Shadow mode. Watch it be right before it touches anything. It logs every change it would make, without writing.
- Confidence checkpoints. Clear-cut cases sync automatically; anything ambiguous is routed to a human, never silently written.
- Draft, you edit, you publish. The machine drafts reports from ground truth; a human owns the framing and hits publish. You set the policy per company and per team.
- Proposed, not forced. Backlog remediation suggests acceptance-criteria fixes; a human approves before anything lands in Jira.
- Every change is an audit checkpoint. Signed into the audit chain: who, what, why, when. Reversible and attributable.
- Kill switch and pause. Per-rule and org-wide, anytime.
Stop paying people to ask people what's done.
Turn on shadow mode, watch GroundTruth be right for a cycle, then let it keep your Jira true.
Start your 14-day free trial