For your role

Spectr for engineering leads

You are not short of tickets. You are short of tickets someone can start without a follow-up conversation, and the follow-up is nearly always about something the ticket left out rather than something it got wrong. Spectr drafts against your actual repos, docs and designs, so what reaches your board describes the system that exists.

A thin ticket looks efficient. Your team pays for it, not the person who wrote it

A one-line ticket with no acceptance criteria costs nothing to write. Inside the team it becomes a Slack thread, a guess, a half-built feature and a re-open. Across a sprint, a real share of engineering time goes on reconstructing intent that was perfectly clear in a meeting three weeks ago.

What it actually looks like

Your team of six. Refinement is Wednesday. Eighteen items in the queue.

  1. Before

    Refinement runs an hour and a half because half the items need scoping in the room. Two get pushed for lack of detail.

  2. Wednesday 10am

    Now: the eighteen items already have acceptance criteria and estimates, written against your three repos.

  3. 10:04am

    One estimate is higher than expected. It is correct - the change touches a queue consumer nobody in the room had thought of, which Spectr found in the code.

  4. 10:11am

    Two items were flagged as probable duplicates before they got here. One was real and is already linked to the original.

  5. 10:32am

    Refinement is done. Four items get their criteria tightened; nothing gets pushed for lack of detail.

  6. Friday

    Three stories are marked done in Jira. Spectr picks that up on its own - nobody updates a second system for the delivery report.

Ninety minutes of refinement has turned into about thirty - with one wrong estimate caught before it was committed to, and one duplicate that never became work at all.

Drafted against your real code

Pin up to five GitHub repos and Spectr searches for the code a discussion concerns, reading those files rather than skimming. Open issues and recent pull requests come in too, so a story can point at work already in flight. Acceptance criteria and estimates end up anchored in what the change would really touch.

Duplicates flagged before they reach you

Every finished spec sheet is checked against the whole project for probable repeats. A flag can be promoted to a confirmed duplicate, which links the two permanently. That is how your backlog stops collecting the same work under three phrasings from three different meetings.

Proper nesting, and formatting that survives the trip

Several stories from one requirement publish as a parent with real sub-tasks instead of unrelated siblings. Descriptions keep their structure: markdown is converted to Jira wiki markup on the way in, so a heading renders as a heading rather than as raw syntax. Invisible when it works, infuriating when it does not.

Status flows back on its own

Spectr reads each published issue's state back from Jira, Linear and Shortcut - done, in progress, or cancelled as its own outcome. Nobody has to keep a second system up to date for the delivery numbers to be right.

Works with

Frequently asked questions

Can Spectr push code or open pull requests?

No. GitHub access is read-only - no pushes, no PRs, no comments. The only thing it ever creates is a ticket in your tracker, after a person approves it.

Who decides the estimates?

Spectr proposes one and anyone can change it at review or afterwards - an edit in Spectr syncs to the ticket. It is a starting point, not an authority.

Do Sentry issues turn into tickets automatically?

No. Sentry is read-only evidence that gets quoted, with a date, in the specs Spectr writes. Whether an error becomes a ticket is still someone's decision.

Will it invent module names that do not exist?

It writes from the repos you pinned and lists which files it read, so you can check. That is a large part of why pinning the right repos is worth the five minutes.

Also worth reading

Spectr by role →

See it on your own project

Free plan available - five spec sheets a month, two seats, no card required. 30-day free trial on Starter.

Free plan available. 30-day free trial on Starter.