01
Velocity Stability
When invisible work absorbs capacity, the gap between what a team plans and what they deliver becomes erratic.
Consistency55 %
§01 — The problem
Some of your teams are carrying work you can’t see.
Every software team does work that never shows up in Jira. The friendly kind: mentoring, incident triage, unblocking other teams, fixing things before they become tickets. And the harder kind: requests that arrived in Slack, handovers that stayed verbal, tickets written after the work was done.
This invisible work drains capacity, skews estimates, and burns people out. Teams that carry a lot of it tend to leave signatures in the data they already keep: velocity that swings, commitments that slip, tickets that never get started, descriptions left empty. The signatures are faint on any single sprint, but persistent across many.
IWRI reads those signatures, scores every Scrum team in your instance, and tells you which ones are worth a conversation — without asking you to roll out a new tool, new process, or new rating system to your engineers.
01
Velocity stability breaks downPlanned work vs delivered work drifts further apart, sprint over sprint.
02
Tickets are left not even startedNot just unfinished. Never picked up. Other things displaced them.
03
Mid-sprint additions become erraticOne week none; next week a flood. The pattern is the problem.
04
Fewer tickets per person than peersWork is happening — just not where the tracker is looking.
05
Descriptions silently empty outRushed ticket creation. Verbal requirements. Nothing documented.
§02 — The app, in three moves
Install it. Let it compute. Read the signals.
01 — The dashboard
Every Scrum team, on one page, with the colour they’ve earned.
IWRI scores every eligible Scrum team in your Jira site and lays them out as a single grid, colour-banded by risk level. You see at a glance where your attention is worth spending, and which teams are sitting comfortably.
- Six risk levels, from Healthy to High, with a dedicated state for Insufficient Data.
- Teams that don’t qualify for scoring — too new, too quiet, too small — are listed under “Not included in analysis” with the exact reason. Surfaced, not silently dropped.
- Group your teams by tribe or stream and the dashboard buckets eligible teams under each group heading automatically.
- Freshness indicator tells you exactly how stale (or fresh) the numbers are.
PAY
Payments
Healthy
MOB
Mobile
Healthy
CAMP
Campaign
Low
REC
Recs
Low
INF
Infra Ops
Moderate
API
Public API
Moderate
DATA
Data Platform
Elevated
BIL
Billing
Elevated
AUTH
Auth & Identity
High
Fig. 01 — Dashboard tab, populated state
02 — The team drill-down
Every flag explains itself. In plain language, in the same breath.
Click a team. Each flag that fired appears with a one-paragraph explanation of what the data is suggesting and why. No z-scores, no sigma, no jargon — managers and leads see the same page, and they see it in English.
- Up to five flags per team, each rooted in a distinct indicator.
- Every flag links to its indicator evidence for the sprints that triggered it.
- Annotations let you add context that travels with the team across recomputes.
Auth & Identity
AUTH · 6 sprints analysed · Last 86 days
Completing less than planned
Velocity is unstable, commitments are consistently missed, and planned work is left unstarted. Three signals, moving together.
Tickets lacking descriptions
A higher proportion of completed tickets have empty descriptions than peer teams, suggesting rushed creation or verbal requirements.
Unpredictable mid-sprint changes
The volume of unplanned work added mid-sprint swings widely between sprints. Interruptions are arriving from inconsistent sources.
Fig. 02 — Team drill-down, flag panel
03 — The methodology
Every formula, every threshold, documented inside the app.
The research is not locked behind a paywall, a whitepaper, or a sales call. IWRI ships with a full methodology tab: every indicator formula, every eligibility rule, every known limitation, every alternative explanation a team might offer. Read it. Disagree with it. Take it to your agile coach.
- Z-score standardisation explained in plain language first, formulas second.
- Every known confound (team size, estimation inflation, benign causes) called out by name.
- Australian English throughout. No em dashes. No marketing slop.
Captures the average shortfall between what a team commits to and what they deliver. Over-delivery is clamped to zero.
mean( max(0, (committed − completed) / committed) )
Fig. 03 — Methodology tab, indicator detail
§03 — Principles
Three constraints we accept on purpose.
01
Screening, not scorecard.
Flags indicate patterns worth investigating. They do not confirm a problem, and they are never a substitute for judgement.
02
Relative, not absolute.
Scores are meaningful within your scored population. Cross-organisation comparison is not supported. By design.
03
Conversation starter, not verdict.
The app points you at where to start a conversation with a team. What happens next is professional judgement, not algorithm.
§04 — Research
Seven signals, distilled from hundreds of Scrum teams.
The research behind IWRI was conducted across hundreds of Scrum teams in banking, telecommunications, and other sectors. Teams self-reported their invisible-work burden through structured surveys; team leads were interviewed to map how that work actually showed up in their day-to-day. Over twenty candidate indicators were tested. Only the seven that held up were kept.
Stage one
20+
candidate indicators across sprint delivery, tracking behaviour, and activity rhythms
Stage two
Hundreds
of Scrum teams across banking, telecommunications, and other sectors
Stage three
07.
validated indicators, each with a split-half reliability score between 53 and 86 percent
Indicators that did not show a consistent, repeatable pattern were discarded.
Reliability below is split-half consistency: how stable each signal remains when two independent halves of the underlying data are compared. A higher figure means the pattern is less likely to come from a single noisy sprint, and more likely to reflect something persistent about the team.
02
Commitment Gaps
Teams carrying invisible work consistently deliver less than they commit to, because their real workload is larger than what is tracked.
Consistency74 %
03
Work Left Undone
Planned tickets that are never even started suggest untracked work displaced the planned work during the sprint.
Consistency69 %
04
Tracking per Person
Teams tracking fewer items per developer than peers may have significant work happening outside Jira entirely.
Consistency78 %
05
Daily Jira Activity
Frequent days with zero Jira activity can indicate the team is busy, just not with anything that shows up in the tool.
Consistency81 %
06
Ticket Descriptions
Empty ticket descriptions often signal rushed ticket creation or work that was communicated verbally and never documented.
Consistency86 %
07
Mid-Sprint Changes
Unpredictable volumes of unplanned work added mid-sprint suggest recurring interruptions from sources not captured in planning.
Consistency53 %
The full methodology — formulas, eligibility rules, every known confound and alternative
explanation — is documented inside the app itself, and on the standalone research note.
Read the research note
§05 — Security & privacy
Your data never leaves Atlassian.
IWRI is a Forge app. It runs entirely on Atlassian’s infrastructure, inside the sandbox that Atlassian audits on your behalf. The developer never sees your Jira data — not during normal operation, not during support, not ever.
01 · Hosting
100% on Atlassian Forge.
All compute runs inside Atlassian’s Forge sandbox. No external servers, no separate vendor cloud.
02 · Scopes
Read-only, and minimal.
Six granular Jira scopes to read sprint, board, and issue data. Plus storage:app for the scores themselves. No writes.
03 · Egress
Zero external fetch.
The manifest declares no external domains. Atlassian’s runtime enforces that. Any undeclared call would be silently blocked.
04 · Storage
Aggregates only, site-scoped.
Only numerical scores, category labels, and admin configuration are persisted. No issue content, no user PII.
05 · Deletion
Uninstall is complete.
Forge purges all app-managed storage on uninstall. No developer action required. No residual data anywhere.
06 · Access
Admin-controlled, three modes.
Open, project-scoped, or admin-granted. Set per site, changeable at any time from the Settings tab.
§06 — Pricing
Per-user, tier-based. Free for teams up to ten.
Billed through the Atlassian Marketplace. Prices below are in USD and reflect list price; your actual bill follows Atlassian’s standard Cloud user tiers. Monthly and annual both available, with annual pricing equivalent to roughly ten months per year.
| Jira users | Monthly | Annual | Per user / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 | Free | Free | — |
| 25 | $35 | $350 | $1.40 |
| 50 | $60 | $600 | $1.20 |
| 100 | $100 | $1,000 | $1.00 |
| 250 | $200 | $2,000 | $0.80 |
| 500 | $350 | $3,500 | $0.70 |
| 1,000 | $600 | $6,000 | $0.60 |
| 2,000 | $1,000 | $10,000 | $0.50 |
| 5,000 | $2,000 | $20,000 | $0.40 |
| 10,000+ | $3,500 | $35,000 | $0.35 |
A thirty-day free trial is included on every paid tier, provided by the Atlassian Marketplace.
§07 — Frequently asked
What people ask before installing.
Will my teams feel like they’re being watched?
IWRI does not score individuals, log time, or track hours. It looks only at aggregate sprint patterns per team. The UI is explicit that outputs are screening signals, not performance judgements, and our terms of service prohibit using scores for hiring, firing, or performance management. Every flag is phrased as a conversation-starter, not a verdict.
What if we’re Kanban, not Scrum?
Version 1 of IWRI supports Scrum only. Kanban projects in your site are shown in the dashboard as excluded with the reason “Kanban (not supported)” rather than hidden. Kanban support is on the roadmap but requires a separate indicator set — the same research that produced the seven Scrum indicators does not transfer cleanly.
We have fewer than twenty Scrum teams. Can we still use it?
Not meaningfully in v1. IWRI’s scores are relative — each team is compared against the population of teams in your site. With fewer than twenty eligible Scrum teams, that comparison is statistically fragile enough that we refuse to produce scores rather than mislead. The app will show a population-minimum message explaining the specific shortfall.
What data does the app store about our teams?
Only derived aggregates: numerical risk scores, category labels, admin configuration, and short annotations authored by admins. No issue content, no user profiles, no sprint or issue keys beyond what is needed to label the aggregate outputs. Everything stored lives in Atlassian Forge Key-Value Storage inside your own tenancy.
Can we grant access to only some people?
Yes. IWRI supports three access modes: open to all licensed Jira users, project-scoped (users see only projects they are admins of), or admin-granted (explicit rules with optional group and project scoping). Admins change modes from the Settings tab at any time.
How often does it recompute?
Admin-configurable: daily or weekly, as a background trigger. Admins can also trigger an on-demand recompute at any time from Settings. Recomputes are cheap — the app processes only the last eight closed sprints within a ninety-day window per project.
Is the methodology public?
Yes, in two places. The app ships with a full methodology tab covering every formula, threshold, eligibility rule, and known limitation. A condensed standalone research note is published at emid11.github.io/iwri-legal/research.html. No whitepaper paywall, no sales call required.
Who built this, and how do I reach them?
IWRI is developed and maintained by Ayman Idris (ABN 59 540 661 752), based in Sydney, Australia. Support is direct to the developer at idrisayman88@gmail.com — response target two business days, best effort.
Install IWRI. See what your sprint data already knows.
Free for teams up to ten. Thirty-day trial on every paid tier. No external data, no surveys, no process change asked of your engineers.
Get it on the Atlassian Marketplace