Introduction

Stale Bot Documentation

Stale Bot helps your team keep Azure DevOps boards clean by finding inactive work items, marking them stale, and optionally closing or archiving them after a grace period.

Who This Is For

• Engineering teams with growing backlogs
• Product and delivery teams that want predictable board hygiene
• DevOps owners who need policy-based automation with dry-run safety

What You Can Automate

• Mark items stale after a configurable inactivity window
• Add custom stale comments and optional user mentions
• Exempt important work by tags, area paths, iterations, or active iterations
• Close stale items after a configurable number of days
• Move closed items to an archive area path

Recommended First Run

1. Configure your stale thresholds and exemptions.
2. Run with dry run enabled and review the report.
3. Enable close stale items after you are confident in the results.
4. Enable auto archive last, after you verify the archive path.

Start Here

• Set up the Stale Item Wizard
• Example Guide
• Blog

Safety Notes

• Dry run mode makes no work item changes.
• Auto archive requires close stale items.
• Exemptions are the best way to protect in-progress or high-priority work.

Need Help?

When reporting an issue, include:

• Your task inputs
• One or two sample work item IDs
• The run log for the failed or unexpected execution