The staleness indicator provides a quick visual cue when a story or bug may be stalled in a workflow step.

It compares the time an item spends in a step with how long similar completed items took in that step, and highlights items that are taking much longer than usual, helping team leads and admins spot potential bottlenecks.

Snooze the staleness indicator

Only Workspace Owners, Administrators, Product Managers, team admins, and backlog owners can snooze staleness indicators.

When a staleness indicator is snoozed, it no longer appears in list or board view for the item. This applies to all users who view the item. The indicator can be snoozed temporarily or indefinitely for a particular step.

1. Open the story or bug.
2. Click the staleness indicator (hourglass) icon next to the workflow step.

3. In the 'Staleness indicator' dialog, toggle the indicator ON or OFF.
4. Select a snooze duration:
   • 1 day
   • 1 week
   • 1 month
   • Until changed (stays off until manually reactivated)

5. Click Save.

When snoozed, the staleness indicator appears greyed out on the story or bug. Hover over it to view the snooze duration.

Edit the snooze duration

1. Open the story or bug.
2. Click the staleness indicator (hourglass) icon next to the workflow step.
3. In the 'Staleness indicator' dialog, click Edit duration.

4. Select a new duration, or toggle the indicator back ON.
5. Click Save.

How staleness is calculated

Atono tracks the total time each item spends in every 'In progress' workflow step, including any re-entries into the step. This way, you can identify items that are lagging without requiring them to stay continuously in the step.

The average time spent in a step is team-specific and calculated using completed items within the team's cycle time window, based on the item type (story or bug) and item size (for stories). By default, a team's cycle time window is six months. To ensure accuracy, outliers are excluded from these averages.

Items are flagged as stale if:

• Their time in an 'In progress' step is more than three standard deviations above the average for similar items. For example, if similar items average 4 days in a step with a standard deviation of 1 day, an item becomes stale after 7 days.
• A minimum of five historical items of the same type and size are available to establish a reliable average (note that 'Unsized' stories are treated as a separate size category).
• The item isn't marked as an outlier.

Because the threshold depends on how much times vary, the indicator appears sooner in a step where items usually take about the same time than in a step where times vary a lot.