DV-18
No Comment Activity in Long-Running Issue
Discipline
Default severity: medium
ProcessMetricsQuality
What it detects
An issue that has been open for longer than the configured threshold has received no comments — no team discussion, no status updates, no decision records are visible in Jira.
Detection formula
IF issue.age_days > config.discipline.comment_expected_after_days // default: 14d AND issue.status NOT IN config.workflow.initial_statuses AND COUNT(issue.comments) \< config.discipline.min_comments_per_period // default: 1 per 14d THEN FLAG no_visible_discussionExamples 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 that has been open for longer than the configured threshold has received no comments while comment expected after days is set to 14d.
Suggested response
Enforce assignee, field, hierarchy, and sprint hygiene rules your team agreed on.
Coaching playbook
Symptom
An issue that has been open for longer than the configured threshold has received no comments — no team discussion, no status updates, no decision records are visible in Jira.
Why it matters
When "No Comment Activity in Long-Running 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 Comment Activity in Long-Running 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.