1. Open and configure the policy
- Install the app in a supported Jira Cloud site through its Marketplace listing.
- Open Stale Work Guard from Jira administration.
- Set warning, stale, and critical age thresholds in days.
- Set the due-soon window and choose whether unassigned work should be flagged.
- Save the policy and run an on-demand scan.
The starting policy warns after 7 days without an update, marks work stale after 14 days, marks it critical after 30 days, and treats work due within 3 days as due soon. Administrators can adjust these values.
2. Understand scores and bands
Each non-complete issue starts at 100. Deterministic deductions reflect aging, stale or critical inactivity, an invalid or passed due date, a due-soon date, and optional missing assignment. Results are grouped into green, amber, or red. Completed work receives a green score of 100.
3. Understand the date basis
Elapsed time uses whole 24-hour periods for created and updated timestamps. Jira due dates are evaluated as UTC calendar dates, and the report states that date basis. This avoids silently mixing local browser time with stored due dates.
4. Use the issue panel
Open an individual issue and expand the Stale Work Guard panel to evaluate its current age, update timing, due-date state, and optional assignment rule. The panel is informational and does not change the issue.
5. Manual and scheduled scans
A Jira administrator can start an on-demand scan. A licensed installation also runs one daily scheduled scan. Each run stops at 5,000 active issues and retains only the latest report. At most 250 non-green issue references are stored; larger result sets are marked truncated.
6. Permissions and data
- read:jira-work reads issue ID and key, created and updated timestamps, due date, issue type, status category, and optional assignee account-ID presence.
- storage:app stores the current policy and latest bounded report in Forge app storage.
Stored findings contain bounded issue references, type and status category, scores and bands, calculated day counts, and finding codes. They exclude summaries, descriptions, assignee names, and email addresses. The app declares no Jira write scope, remote backend, or external egress.
7. Delete the latest report
Use Delete stored report on the admin page to remove the latest stale-work report. The current policy remains until changed or the installation data is handled through Atlassian’s app lifecycle.
8. Troubleshooting
A completed issue is still flagged
The app uses Jira’s status-category key. Confirm the workflow status belongs to Jira’s Done category.
A due date appears one day different
Due dates use UTC calendar days. Compare the Jira due-date value itself, not a browser-local timestamp.
The average score is unavailable
An empty scanned population is reported as unavailable rather than zero. Confirm the site has active issues visible to the app.
9. Support
Email contact@craigtechservices.com with the app name, approximate time, expected behavior, observed behavior, and reproduction steps. Do not send passwords, API tokens, or unnecessary issue content.