Tacet: Backlog Cleanup for Jira

Find the work nobody has touched, decide what survives, and retire the rest with the reason on record.

Backlogs fill up with work nobody will do. Tacet finds it, shows it to you in one list, and retires it with an audit comment on every item, so the history explains itself.

Getting started

Open Apps › Tacet: Backlog Cleanup from the Jira navigation.
Choose a board or a project and how many days of silence count as stale, then Find stale work.
Review the list. Untick anything that should live, or group it by assignee to review per person.
Choose the action (close with a resolution, move to a status, or warn first), write the reason once, and confirm. The button asks a second time before anything changes.

What counts as stale

A work item is stale when nothing about it has changed for the chosen number of days and it is not already done. Exclusions keep out work in an active or future sprint, work due in the future or in an unreleased version, parents with children still open, anything carrying a label you choose, and anything matched by extra JQL you add. The list shows how many items the exclusions left out.

Closing, moving and warning

Close transitions each item to done with the resolution you choose; Won't Do is the default so retired work never counts as finished in throughput or velocity. In team managed projects Jira sets the resolution itself, and the result says so. Move transitions to a status you pick; items without that transition are skipped and reported. Warn leaves work open and posts a comment; anything updated during the grace period survives, and the rest can be closed from the Warned tab once the period ends. In every case the comment, with your reason, is written before the change.

Sweeps and undo

Every sweep is recorded on the Sweeps tab with its scope, action and result. Reopen puts each item back in the status it had and clears the resolution. Use scope loads a past sweep's scope into the search, and scopes you use often can be saved by name.

Administrator settings

Site administrators set the default number of days, the default resolution, the audit comment template, the grace period and template for warnings, and the accent color used for buttons and highlights.

Permissions and data

Tacet acts as the person using it, so Jira's own permissions decide what can be found and closed; the app never acts on its own behalf. It stores sweep records (scope, action, the keys and prior statuses of the items changed, and the account ID of the person who ran the sweep), warning records, saved scopes and administrator settings in Atlassian Forge hosted storage. The app declares zero external network egress; no data leaves Atlassian's infrastructure.

Support

Questions or problems: support@helzbrand.com