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OpenHands can enhance every phase of your software development lifecycle (SDLC), from planning through deployment. This guide shows some example prompts that you can use when you integrate OpenHands into your development workflow.

Integration with Development Workflows

Planning Phase

Use OpenHands during planning to accelerate technical decisions: Technical specification assistance:
Sprint planning support:

Development Phase

OpenHands excels during active development: Feature implementation:
  • Write new features with clear specifications
  • Follow existing code patterns automatically
  • Generate tests alongside code
  • Create documentation as you go
Bug fixing:
  • Analyze error logs and stack traces
  • Identify root causes
  • Implement fixes with regression tests
  • Document the issue and solution
Code improvement:
  • Refactor for clarity and maintainability
  • Optimize performance bottlenecks
  • Update deprecated APIs
  • Improve error handling

Testing Phase

Automate test creation and improvement:

Review Phase

Accelerate code reviews:

Deployment Phase

Assist with deployment preparation:

CI/CD Integration

OpenHands can be integrated into your CI/CD pipelines through the Software Agent SDK. Rather than using hypothetical actions, you can build powerful, customized workflows using real, production-ready tools.

GitHub Actions Integration

The Software Agent SDK provides composite GitHub Actions for common workflows: For example, to set up automated PR reviews, see the Automated Code Review guide which uses the OpenHands/extensions/plugins/pr-review composite action.

What You Can Automate

Using the SDK, you can create GitHub Actions workflows to:
  1. Automatic code review when a PR is opened
  2. Automatically update docs weekly when new functionality is added
  3. Diagnose errors that have appeared in monitoring software such as DataDog and automatically send analyses and improvements
  4. Manage TODO comments and track technical debt
  5. Assign reviewers based on code ownership patterns

Getting Started

To integrate OpenHands into your CI/CD:
  1. Review the SDK Getting Started guide
  2. Explore the GitHub Workflows examples
  3. Set up your LLM_API_KEY as a repository secret
  4. Use the provided composite actions or build custom workflows
See the Use Cases section for complete examples of production-ready integrations.

Team Workflows

Solo Developer Workflows

For individual developers: Daily workflow:
  1. Morning review: Have OpenHands analyze overnight CI results
  2. Feature development: Use OpenHands for implementation
  3. Pre-commit: Request review before pushing
  4. Documentation: Generate/update docs for changes
Best practices:
  • Set up automated reviews on all PRs
  • Use OpenHands for boilerplate and repetitive tasks
  • Keep AGENTS.md updated with project patterns

Small Team Workflows

For teams of 2-10 developers: Collaborative workflow:
Communication integration:
  • Slack notifications for OpenHands findings
  • Automatic issue creation for bugs found
  • Weekly summary reports

Enterprise Team Workflows

For larger organizations: Governance and oversight:
  • Configure approval requirements for OpenHands changes
  • Set up audit logging for all AI-assisted changes
  • Define scope limits for automated actions
  • Establish human review requirements
Scale patterns:

Best Practices

Code Review Integration

Set up effective automated reviews:

Pull Request Automation

Automate common PR tasks:
TriggerAction
PR openedAuto-review, label by type
Tests failAnalyze failures, suggest fixes
Coverage dropsIdentify missing tests
PR approvedUpdate changelog, check docs

Quality Gates

Define automated quality gates:

Automated Testing

Integrate OpenHands with your testing strategy: Test generation triggers:
  • New code without tests
  • Coverage below threshold
  • Bug fix without regression test
  • API changes without contract tests
Example workflow:

Common Integration Patterns

Pre-Commit Hooks

Run OpenHands checks before commits:

Post-Commit Actions

Automate tasks after commits:

Scheduled Tasks

Run regular maintenance:

Event-Triggered Workflows

You can build custom event-triggered workflows using the Software Agent SDK. For example, the Incident Triage use case shows how to automatically analyze and respond to issues. For more event-driven automation patterns, see: