Bob Delivery Line

Bob Delivery Line takes a single product requirement and turns it into a documented, traced and tested microservice, built by five IBM Bob agents, with humans in the loop only where judgment is needed. The problem: shipping even a small feature is a relay. A requirement passes from product owner to architect, through refinement meetings, to a developer, then to testing and review. That is nine steps and five roles, and each person has to re-read the functional, technical and non-functional requirements to rebuild context. Tests come after the code, and every review finding starts another rework loop. Most of the time goes into meetings and handoffs, not into building. The solution: five specialist agents, each a custom Bob mode backed by its own skill, and each one reading the previous agent's output. The Product Owner agent writes an SRS with requirement IDs and Given/When/Then acceptance criteria. The Technical Architect agent produces the SDD, architecture decision records and Liquibase migrations. The Delivery agent builds the backlog, story points and sprint plan. The Testing Engineer agent derives test cases, BDD features and a requirements traceability matrix. The Coding agent implements the service sub-task by sub-task, with a review on every file. When an agent is missing context, it doesn't guess: it sends a structured question to a human in Mattermost through MCP. Seven custom skills, about 1,450 lines of instructions, encode real engineering standards: ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 for requirements, IEEE 1016 and arc42 with C4 and ADRs for architecture, INVEST stories with Fibonacci points, and boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning and state transitions for testing. A merge gate checks the full test suite, coverage and leftover TODOs, and a global hook keeps every conversation under 80,000 tokens so output quality stays high. The proof: from one idea, a payment service for a Venmo-like app, the pipeline produced 45 requirements, 3 ADRs, 10 user stories over 2 sprints, 59 test cases and 45 BDD scenarios traced back to requirements, plus a 47-file Java 21 / Spring Boot service with 37 unit and integration tests. It includes a double-entry ledger, idempotency keys, deadlock-safe locking and exact money handling. Zero lines of code were written by hand, and the main build session cost about 22 Bobcoins. The demo shows a live change request typed in plain words: "an admin should be able to see all transactions." In about 2.5 minutes Bob updated the SRS with new requirement IDs, added a new epic and user story to the backlog, and fitted the story into the sprint plan, with the developer approving each step. The developer then asked Bob to explain the technical design and the business scenario, answered directly from the SDD. After "implement US-011", Bob switched to Coding Agent mode, built the first sub-tasks, found and fixed a failing unit test on its own, and had 7 unit tests passing about 13 minutes after the request. The impact: fewer meetings and handoffs, faster onboarding, and a product developers can understand. Every task carries its business purpose and technical design, so developers can question it from either side. Testing is planned from the requirements instead of added at the end, and every artifact stays traceable. Teams can run the pipeline step by step with a developer, or fully automated. Next: run the merge gate in CI with automatic pull requests, add a DevOps agent to carry code to a deployed environment, and reuse the same modes and skills on new services.