Stale Issue Detection

Most missed sprint commitments aren’t dramatic — they’re issues that quietly stop moving. SyncUp surfaces these in two places.

1. Time-in-status on the Developer brief

In the 📌 Your Focus Today section of a developer’s Daily Brief, each in-progress item shows how many days it’s been in its current status. The lozenge color shifts from yellow (sticking) to red (clearly stalled) as the item ages.

Alongside, when your time-in-status is meaningful, SyncUp also displays the team’s average time-in-status for in-progress items. This makes “am I stuck or is everyone slow?” a one-glance question.

2. Decisions Needed (Product Owner brief)

The Product Owner’s Daily Brief has a 📝 Decisions Needed section. An issue lands here when either of these is true:

• The issue has a label that signals it’s awaiting input (typical examples include words like question, decision, blocker, waiting, needs-input — exact label matching is described in the Configuration page).
• The issue is still in To Do and hasn’t been updated for an extended period.

The list shows the most-stale items first, with a days-since-update lozenge and, when present, the matching label.

This list is the closest SyncUp has to a single “things gathering dust” view.

3. Blocker Aging (Scrum Master brief)

The Scrum Master brief’s ⛔ Blocked section lists every issue with Jira’s flagged attribute, sorted by how long it’s been blocked. The aging lozenge shifts to red once an item has been blocked long enough to warrant attention.

The same data fuels the Blocker Aging alert in the Alerts tab — one alert per flagged issue, at HIGH severity, targeted at Scrum Masters.

Defaults

The staleness thresholds and decision-related label list are currently fixed and not user-configurable. If you’d like configurable thresholds (per-project staleness window, label list editing), let us know — it’s a likely future addition.

What to do when something is stale

Stale is a prompt, not a verdict. Common next steps:

1. Ping the assignee — a quick comment surfaces a real blocker.
2. Re-assign or split — the work may be larger than one person can finish.
3. Drop from sprint — if the work is no longer relevant.
4. Mark as flagged — convert ambiguous “stuck” into an explicit blocker. The Scrum Master brief tracks flagged items separately.

Next

• Daily Brief — where stale signals appear by role.
• Actionable Suggestions — alerts and SM suggestions together.