Stale Item Wizard

Keep your Azure DevOps backlog healthy, focused, and easy to manage with automated stale item detection.

Stale Item Wizard helps teams identify work items that have been inactive for too long, apply a clear stale status, and optionally close or archive them based on your team’s rules. This reduces backlog noise, highlights work that still needs attention, and helps engineering, product, and support teams stay aligned on what is truly active.

Pricing & Tiers

Stale Item Wizard is completely free for a single project per Azure DevOps organization.

• Free Tier: 1 project included forever (requires initial configuration/account setup)Create an account and Configure.

• Multi-Project & Enterprise: Need to run across multiple projects? See our Pricing Plans for organization-wide licensing.

To get started with your free project, follow the setup instructions in our Documentation.

Why teams use it

Backlogs grow quickly, and older work items can hide important work, slow down planning, and create confusion across teams. Stale Item Wizard gives you a simple, repeatable way to maintain backlog hygiene without manual triage.

With this extension, you can:

• automatically find work items that have not been updated for a configurable period
• tag stale items so they are easy to identify and review
• close stale items after a defined grace period
• move completed stale work into an archive area path
• generate a summary report to support governance and review

How it works

The task runs inside an Azure Pipelines workflow and checks your work items against your stale-age rules. You define the threshold, the stale tag, and whether old items should be closed or archived. The extension then evaluates the backlog, applies the stale state, and provides a clear report of what changed.

This makes stale item management part of your normal DevOps process rather than a manual cleanup exercise.

Key capabilities

• configurable stale age thresholds
• custom stale tag naming
• optional automatic closure of stale items
• archive path support for completed cleanup workflows
• pipeline-based automation for repeatable execution
• actionable reporting for teams and reviewers

Ideal for

Stale Item Wizard is especially useful for teams managing larger backlogs, cross-functional delivery work, support queues, or active product roadmaps where inactive items can accumulate over time.

It is a practical fit for:

• product teams maintaining large backlogs
• engineering organizations reducing operational noise
• support and operations teams tracking aging issues
• teams that want a structured, automated cleanup process in Azure DevOps

Built for Azure DevOps workflows

This extension is designed to fit naturally into Azure DevOps pipelines and work item processes. It helps teams enforce lifecycle hygiene without introducing a separate system or a heavy manual review process.

If your team wants better backlog discipline, fewer stale issues, and a more maintainable Azure DevOps experience, Stale Item Wizard is a straightforward solution.