DV-21
Feature With No Child Stories
Discipline
Default severity: medium
ProcessMetricsQuality
What it detects
A Feature has been in an active status for longer than the configured grace period with no child stories or tasks — delivery cannot be tracked at the team level.
Detection formula
IF issue.type = config.workflow.feature_type AND issue.status IN config.workflow.active_statuses AND COUNT(child_issues WHERE type IN config.workflow.story_types) = 0 AND time_in_active > config.discipline.feature_decompose_grace_days // default: 5d THEN FLAG undecomposed_featureExamples 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 a feature has been in an active status for longer than the configured grace period with no child stories or tasks while feature type is set to Configured per workspace.
Suggested response
Enforce assignee, field, hierarchy, and sprint hygiene rules your team agreed on.
Coaching playbook
Symptom
A Feature has been in an active status for longer than the configured grace period with no child stories or tasks — delivery cannot be tracked at the team level.
Why it matters
When "Feature With No Child Stories" 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 "Feature With No Child Stories" 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.