Ping-Pong Detection — find tickets bouncing between people or statuses
Some tickets go forward. Some go in circles. Avium tells you which.
The retro topic that never comes up
A ticket bounces from Alex to Sarah and back. Alex thought it was Sarah's; Sarah sent it back; Alex sent it back again. Each individual hand-off feels reasonable. The aggregate is a ticket that's spent a week passing back and forth and nobody has owned.
Or: a ticket goes from In Progress to Review, back to In Progress, back to Review, back to In Progress. The team doesn't have language for that. Nobody complains. The ticket eventually closes, twice as slowly as it should have.
How teams try to catch ping-pong today
They mostly don't. The patterns are invisible unless someone aggregates:
- Engineers feel it — 'this ticket keeps coming back to me' — but never aggregate. Anecdote, not pattern.
- Retros where someone says 'we had a few weird tickets this sprint' and the conversation moves on.
- Tracking reassignment counts via Jira's history view, one ticket at a time. Doesn't scale.
- Specialty matrices that assume hand-offs are skill-based when they're often process-based.
How Avium Signals detects ping-pong
Avium looks for cycles in the assignee + status transition history of each ticket.
- Person ping-pong: assignee changes A → B → A (or longer cycles). Two complete cycles in the same ticket = ping-pong fired.
- Status ping-pong: status changes In Progress → Review → In Progress → Review. Same logic, different field.
- Severity: longer cycle, more cycles, longer total dwell = higher severity. Surfaced on the Insights page as a Signal card.
- Per-ticket details: who's involved, which transitions, when they happened. The retro material is the list itself.
Who reads this Signal
See where your work is going in circles
Free tier surfaces ping-pong tickets once your work management tool is connected (Jira today, more integrations on the way). The pattern detection runs on every load; the AI Briefing on Business adds the 'why this is happening' narrative.
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