DV-04

No Status Update in Active Issue

Discipline

Default severity: medium
ProcessMetricsQuality

What it detects

An issue in an active status has received no changelog update of any kind — no status change, no field update, no comment — for longer than the configured staleness period. Different from BH-08 (which fires after 60+ days); this is an early warning at a shorter configurable threshold.

Detection formula

staleness_warning = config.discipline.active_update_warning_days // default: 5d IF issue.status IN config.workflow.active_statuses AND (today - MAX(changelog.date, comments.date)) > staleness_warning THEN FLAG IF > config.discipline.active_update_critical_days // default: 14d THEN CRITICAL

Examples in practice

  • Assignee, field, hierarchy, or sprint hygiene rules are violated on active work.
  • Issues miss mandatory fields or ownership while still in progress.
  • A team shows an issue in an active status has received no changelog update of any kind while active update warning days is set to 5d.

Suggested response

Enforce assignee, field, hierarchy, and sprint hygiene rules your team agreed on.

Coaching playbook

Symptom

An issue in an active status has received no changelog update of any kind — no status change, no field update, no comment — for longer than the configured staleness period. Different from BH-08 (which fires after 60+ days); this is an early warning at a shorter configurable threshold.

Why it matters

When "No Status Update in Active Issue" keeps appearing, the team is signalling a repeatable process gap. Left unexamined, the pattern hides where work really stalls and makes improvement metrics harder to trust.

What you can achieve

Enforce assignee, field, hierarchy, and sprint hygiene rules your team agreed on.

Facilitation questions

  • What system change would stop "No Status Update in Active Issue" from firing again?
  • What do the cited issues have in common — same root cause or same workaround?
  • Who owns the two-week experiment and how will we verify on the next import?

Run this rule against your own tracker data with Flow Analyzer.

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DV-04: No Status Update in Active Issue — FlowAnalyzer