Alerts Tab — Feature Guide

What it's for

The Alerts tab surfaces data-quality and dependency problems across every issue in the project — sprints, backlog, and any issues returned by the project's JQL filter. It tells the user which issues need attention before delivery: items closed without burning down their estimate, blockers that finish after their dependent starts, blockers and dependents in the wrong sprints, child issues whose due dates outlive their parents, missing planning fields, and circular dependency chains.

The audience is scrum masters, project managers, and release leads. Alerts is the deterministic counterpart to the AI-driven Risks tab: every alert here is produced by a rule, every rule has a single threshold, and the same rule that fires on this tab also feeds the Dashboard's Alerts and Dependency Conflicts diagnostic rows.

The tab assumes the user has a JQL filter or sprint board configured. With no filter and no issues, an explanatory empty state replaces the alert list.

The one control row at the top

One row carries everything: a Filter by issue key or text… search box, three severity buttons, and the counts.

• Search narrows the visible alerts to rows whose issue key or message contains the typed string.
• All (default) / Errors / Warnings — severity buttons that AND-combine with the search.
• N alerts · N errors · N warnings — the totals, sitting beside those controls. They always reflect the unfiltered totals, so the reader knows the overall state of the project even while reading a filtered view. (Dismissing a row updates the per-category counts but not these.)
• Show dismissed / Hide dismissed — appears whenever any alert has been dismissed. Turning it on reveals dismissed items in faded form with a Restore button per row.

The search and severity buttons are local to the tab; they do not affect the counts or the tab badge.

Domains and categories

Alerts are grouped into five domains, each headed by its name and N active, and each holding one folding card per category. A category's header carries its title, a small ⓘ that explains in plain English what the category means, the count of active alerts, and its buttons.

Delivery risk domain (purple)

• Overdue — issues past their due date and not done. Severity: warning. Also summarised in the Dashboard's Project Statistics table.

Risk strategy domain (red)

Surfaces decisions on the Risks tab that are waiting on someone. Both categories link a row click back to the Risks tab with the affected risk scrolled into view.

• Escalated risks awaiting decision — every open risk whose response strategy is Escalate. Message reads Awaiting decision from {Escalation owner} (or Awaiting escalation owner when none is set). Severity: error (these count toward the error total and the nav badge). Its header carries an Open risk button that goes straight to that risk on the Risks tab, rather than making the reader open the category, find the row and click through.
• Risk review due — every open Defer risk (or Accept risk with a review-by date) where today has reached review-by minus 3 days. Past review-by renders as error severity; within the lead window renders as warning.

Dependency risk domain (red)

Where blockers, dependents, parents, and children create timing problems.

• Circular dependencies — follows the blocks / is blocked by links to find loops. The cycle path is rendered as a chain (e.g., PROJ-1 → PROJ-2 → PROJ-3 → PROJ-1) with each key linked to the issue. Cycles are deduplicated so A → B → A and B → A → B count once. A recovery hint sentence appears under the chain ("To resolve: remove one of the 'blocked by' links in the cycle (e.g. drop PROJ-1's blockedBy on PROJ-2)") so the user knows which edge to break first. Severity: error.
• Dependency conflicts — fires when a blocker's resolved due date is later than the blocked issue's start date (error), when a blocker sits in a later sprint than the blocked issue (error), or when the blocker's status is unknown and dates are missing (warning). Also fires (as an error) as soon as the blocked issue's start date has passed while the blocker is still open — there is no tolerance window. The message reads Blocked by {KEY} — start date passed but blocker still open.
• Child after parent — child due date later than parent due date. Severity: warning. Message includes the day delta.

Data quality domain (orange)

Where the issue itself is malformed or in an inconsistent state.

• Done with remaining work — issue is in a done-set status (done, closed, resolved, complete, completed) but still has remaining work left on it. Severity: error. The remaining time is formatted human-friendly (2d 3h 45m).
• Missing estimates — active or future-sprint issue that is not done has no estimate at all. In points mode this means it has no story points; in time mode it means it has neither an original nor a remaining time estimate. Severity: warning.
• Missing dates — active or future-sprint issue that is not done is missing its start date, its due date, or both. Severity: warning. The message specifies which field is missing.
• Unassigned — active or future-sprint issue that is not done has no assignee. Severity: warning.

The fifth domain, Scope & capacity, carries two categories: Sprint over capacity (an open sprint whose remaining work exceeds the capacity still ahead of it — an error above a fifth over, a warning below) and Person over capacity in a sprint (one person's remaining work in a sprint against their own capacity for it). Both use the same comparison the sprint card's badge makes. A sprint with no capacity at all is left out — that is a setup problem, and the screens showing capacity say which of the three states it is. Until 2026-09-01 this domain had no categories and always reported clear, even on a badly overloaded project.

Per-row affordances

Each alert row contains:

• Severity mark — never colour alone: the row carries its severity as a mark as well as a colour.
• Issue key — a link. Clicking it opens that issue in Jira. Issue keys are links everywhere on this tab, including inside a circular-dependency chain.
• Issue summary — issue title plus the alert message (e.g., Blocked by PROJ-456 which finishes 5 days after this starts).
• Create action — a small button (visible only when action creation is available) that creates an action item on the most relevant sprint scope: the alert's sprint, or the active sprint, or the next future sprint, or Project scope as a fallback. The action title is auto-populated from the alert. A toast confirms.
• Dismiss (×) — appears on hover. Clicking it dismisses the alert. The dismissal is saved to the app's Atlassian Forge storage (held in an in-memory cache loaded at startup, so it restores instantly and survives reloads on the same Jira instance). Removed on uninstall.

Category headers

Each category folds. The header shows the arrow, the category title, its ⓘ explanation, the active alert count, and its buttons. A Create risk button appears on any category with alerts except the two Risk strategy ones (Escalated risks awaiting decision, Risk review due), which are already about existing risks and carry Open risk instead. Clicking it opens the Risks tab pre-populated with: the category title (e.g., Circular dependencies detected), an evidence block listing the alerts as bullet items, and a category / probability / impact pre-mapped from a built-in category-to-risk mapping.

A category that has no active alerts but does have dismissed ones still renders its (collapsed) header so the user can use Show dismissed to restore them. A category with no alerts at all is hidden entirely.

Empty / loading / error states

• Loading — Loading issues… while the JQL fetch is in flight.
• No data + no JQL configured — No data with a hint to configure a JQL filter in Settings.
• JQL error — the error message returned by the backend.
• All clear — green check + All clear! No alerts found when the issue set produces zero alerts.
• Per-domain clean — within an open domain, if every category there is empty (or all dismissed), a small green card reads No Dependency Risk alerts (or the analogous data-quality version) so the user gets explicit confirmation rather than a silent empty section.

Cross-cutting modes and settings

• Sprint mode — controls which issues are considered active. Closed-sprint issues are excluded from missing-dates and missing-estimates checks (those are historical noise) but can still trigger done-with-remaining and dependency-conflict alerts when the violation is current.
• Estimation mode — drives which Jira field is read for Missing Estimates. In time mode, the alerts read the original and remaining time estimates; in points mode, story points.

How the numbers are computed

Every alert is produced by the alerts engine plus a dedicated circular-dependency detector. The implementation is documented in ALGORITHMS section 14c — Alerts Engine — including the sprint-boundary check inside Dependency Conflicts, the cycle deduplication in Circular Dependencies, and the JQL/sprints/backlog precedence used to merge the issue set.

Effects on other parts of the app

• Dashboard Project Statistics — the Alerts row and the Dependency Conflicts row both read the same alerts output. The Dashboard's Alerts row counts the same totals shown in this tab's summary line.
• Tab badge — the badge next to Alerts in the main navigation is the count of active error-severity alerts; warnings do not bump the badge.
• Risks tab — Create risk on a category jumps to Risks with an evidence block and pre-mapped probability / impact. Once a risk has been accepted from an alert, the link is recorded in the risk's provenance fields so the Risks card can show N alerts currently match.
• Action items — Create action puts the alert's evidence into the Actions tab on the most relevant sprint scope.
• Notifications — high-severity alerts (e.g., circular dependencies) feed the Notification engine.