Author’s note: This engagement reflects my own work leading the delivery. Client specifics are anonymized; outcomes are conservative and directionally accurate.
Problem Statement
The insurer’s monolithic policy administration platform required extensive manual effort to introduce new functionality or remediate defects. Each change triggered ad-hoc discovery, bespoke scaffolding, and elongated regression cycles before production release. User stories arrived without complete acceptance criteria, architecture reviews repeated pattern decisions, and quality assurance surfaced incidents late in the process. Combined, these factors extended release cycles beyond three weeks and consumed significant weekend capacity from development and testing teams.
Solution
To stabilise delivery and accelerate throughput, an agentic SDLC fabric was deployed alongside existing governance controls. The design combined four specialised agents, shared telemetry, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints to compress every stage of the lifecycle while maintaining compliance and auditability.
Functional Components
- Product Owner Agent – converts raw business demand into well-formed backlog items with structured acceptance criteria, proactively identifying missing data and policy dependencies.
- Architect Agent – recommends reference designs, reuse candidates, and non-functional guardrails derived from an approved pattern catalogue, reducing rework in design reviews.
- Developer Agent – generates scaffolded modules, integration hooks, and starter tests aligned to the insurer’s coding standards so teams start from a compliant baseline.
- Testing Agent – produces unit and integration test skeletons, synthetic data packs, and risk-based regression suites that shift defect discovery into pull requests.
Execution Controls
- Agent-generated changes are published to dedicated feature branches for mandatory human review, preventing automated comments from obscuring reviewer feedback.
- Guardrails enforce diff-size limits, formatting compliance, security policies, and environment targeting before agents may propose execution steps.
- CI/CD optimisations (build caching, queue telemetry, red/green dashboards) ensure sub-five-minute feedback loops and transparent bottleneck monitoring.
Outcomes
The agentic SDLC fabric delivered materially shorter release cadences, cutting cycle duration by 35-50% across three comparable quarters while keeping delivery within existing governance. Automated guardrails surfaced 42% more high-severity defects before merger, kept policy violations under 1%, and allowed teams to retire weekend hotfix rotations. Engineers reclaimed roughly a third of their setup effort thanks to prebuilt scaffolds and telemetry, redirecting time toward solution design and risk management. Collectively, these shifts repositioned the insurer’s SDLC as a repeatable, telemetry-driven capability that leadership now showcases in pre-sales conversations and ongoing program governance.