Sprint Risk Forecast — predict sprint failure before it happens
Stop finding out at sprint review. Avium Signals reads your Jira data — or any work management tool — and forecasts which sprints are about to miss — and why.
The week-3 surprise problem
Every scrum master has lived this: standup on day 2 of the sprint feels fine. Standup on day 8 feels fine. Day 10, you start sensing something's off, but the burndown chart still looks survivable. Day 12, suddenly half the tickets are blocked, two engineers are over capacity, and the sprint goal you committed to is unreachable. By sprint review you're explaining why three stories slipped — and the explanation is the same one as last sprint, and the sprint before that.
The data that would have caught this was in Jira the whole time. Nobody had a way to see it together.
How agile teams try to detect sprint risk today
Most scrum masters and agile coaches build something to compensate. The shape varies; the pain doesn't.
- A spreadsheet of who's working on what, manually updated from Jira every Monday. Stale by Tuesday.
- A burndown chart that's accurate-ish, but lags reality by a day and doesn't account for blockers.
- A Slack reminder to ask each engineer 'how's it going' — relies on engineers volunteering bad news.
- Confluence-page sprint health summaries written by the SM the morning of sprint review — too late to act.
- Jira's built-in reports: Burndown, Velocity, Sprint Report. They tell you what HAPPENED. They don't tell you what's about to.
How Avium Signals computes sprint risk
Sprint Risk is one of the patterns the Avium Signals engine watches every time the Insights page loads. It's deterministic — same data, same answer, no LLM call, no API key. The Signal fires on a combination of three measurable conditions:
- Pace gap: percent of work done vs percent of sprint elapsed. If 60% of the sprint is gone but only 35% of the work is done, that's a 25-point pace gap — material risk.
- Blocker count: number of tickets currently flagged or stuck in review with no recent activity (default threshold: 7 days no log AND no status change). One blocker is noise; four blockers concentrated in the same sprint is a pattern.
- Over-allocation: people with committed work above 105% of their capacity. Often the actual driver of risk — a sprint with healthy pace can still miss if the one person who can finish the last three tickets is already pulled six different directions.
- When any two of the three fire simultaneously, the Signal escalates severity. Avium's UI renders that on the Sprint Risk card and the daily AI Briefing surfaces it as a top-of-mind item.
Who reads this Signal
Run Sprint Risk on your own sprints
Free tier connects to your work management tool (Jira today, more integrations on the way), pulls your active sprint, and shows Sprint Risk against your real tickets. No credit card. Avium Intelligence (the AI briefing layer on top) is available on Business; the Signal itself runs on Team.
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