Interpreting scores
Every ticket Vindex evaluates produces a story health score — a single number that tells you whether the story is ready for sprint planning, borderline, or a source of Requirements Roulette waiting to happen.
Anatomy of a score
A story health score has three layers. Each layer answers a different question and is designed for a different reader.
Layer 1
Overall story health
A single number from 0 to 10, rounded to one decimal — 6.4. The arithmetic mean of all six INVEST dimensions.
Layer 2
Plain-language finding
The problems Vindex found in plain English — “Acceptance criteria are missing or untestable.” No codes, no jargon.
Layer 3
INVEST dimension scores
The underlying six dimensions, each scored from 1 to 10. For example T: 3/10 — testability is low.
Score ranges
The overall score and per-dimension scores share the same 0–10 scale. The quality gate sits at 7.0. Stories below it shouldn't enter a sprint without refinement.
Healthy
7.0 – 10.0
Clears the quality gate. Ready for sprint planning with no blocking issues.
Needs review
5.0 – 6.9
Borderline story health. Take it into refinement before committing to a sprint.
At risk
0 – 4.9
Below the quality gate. Should not enter a sprint in this state.
Per-dimension fail threshold
Individual INVEST dimensions use a stricter threshold. A dimension score below 5is counted as a “fail” because it sits in the bottom 40% of the scale — a clear signal the story doesn't satisfy that dimension well enough to move forward.
| Code | Plain-language label | What a low score means |
|---|---|---|
| I | Independence Independent | The story depends on other work that is not yet done, so it cannot move into a sprint on its own. |
| N | Negotiability Negotiable | Implementation is pre-decided in the ticket. There is no room for the team to choose the best approach. |
| V | Value clarity Valuable | The user or business outcome is unclear. No one reading the ticket can tell who benefits and why. |
| E | Estimability Estimable | There is not enough detail to size the work with any confidence. |
| S | Scope size Small | The story is too large to complete inside a sprint as a working increment. |
| T | Testability Testable | There are no acceptance criteria, or the criteria cannot be verified. |
Where scores appear
Scores dashboard
The /portal/scores dashboard shows your company's all-time average, a time-series trend chart, and a paginated list of every scored ticket.
Score detail page
Click any scored ticket to see the full INVEST breakdown, recommendations, the context used during scoring, and the model that produced it.
Trend over time
Toggle individual INVEST dimensions on and off to see which areas are trending up and which are dragging down your overall story health.
Admin view
Vindex Admins see the same data globally at /admin/scores, with per-company averages surfaced directly on the companies list.
Acting on a score
A low score is a prompt to refine, not a judgement on the author. Open the story detail page and start with the top recommendations — they are ordered by the improvement that would raise the overall score the most.
Work down the INVEST breakdown to see which single dimension is pulling the score down. A 6.4 overall often hides one dimension scoring 3 while the rest score 7+. Fixing that one dimension is usually enough to clear the quality gate.
Re-score after editing. In Jira the Issue Panel has a Re-score button; via the API, any update to the story body triggers a fresh evaluation automatically.