Age of an Idea
Asked by Martin:

Good morning,

I need a way to identify the age of an idea. So far, I was able to create this based on an automation that calculate the created day difference to today and write it to a field.

This brings me a problem, the idea gets updated everyday this automation is run.

Do you have another alternative? Our managers would love to glace and see which ideas are getting old, and at the same time, received a report of what changed this week.

Thank you, Merci,

For reference, where's the automation I have been using:

![Greenshot 2023-07-04 11.19.51.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/266587iF8559EA3AB91F6D3/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Greenshot 2023-07-04 11.19.51.png")


Answers:
author: Abel Lineberger
body: I am thinking about a "Staleness" quantification. Some way to quantify how long an idea has been sitting without interaction.  
Should include:

* Date of Creation
* Date of Last Update to include
  * Status transition
  * Addition of comment
  * Addition of insight
  * Check off of Specification or Design
  * Addition of Delivery tickets
  * Change in Goal, Goal Impact, Effort, Effort Impact

Best case:

* Should be a number as relevant to all other issues (not completed/in same status) so that we get a relative staleness. IE This issue is twice as stale as this issue, etc.

Current blockers:

* Updated field cannot be part of a custom equation.


author: Omer Meshar
body: You can always create a view of the ideas sorted by Created, which will show you the ideas by their age (and you can filter out those that are in an already progressing status). This doesn't give you the notion of how old are they, but it does give you the right order of their "age".


author: Emre Toptanc? _OBSS_
body: Hello [@Martin](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2871165)

Ideas are also represented with Jira issues underneath so anything that works for Jira issues should work for ideas too.

Our team at OBSS built [Time in Status](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211756/) for this. It is available for Jira Server, Cloud, and Data Center.

Time in Status mainly allows you to see how much time each issue spent on each **status.** You can do the same for ideas.

![tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_with Estimates.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/170015i6CBCFEFDC1640B76/image-dimensions/215x97?v=v2 "tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_with Estimates.png")

You can combine the time for multiple statuses to get metrics like **Idea Age.**

For all numeric report types, you can calculate **averages** and **sums** of those durations grouped by the issue fields you select. For example total in-progress time per *customer*or average resolution time per sprint, week, month, issuetype, request type, etc. The ability to group by parts of dates (year, month, week, day, hour) or sprints is particularly useful here since it allows you to compare different time periods or see the trend.

![tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_Average_TimeGrouped.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/170014i3A4C82B8C3EE58D2/image-dimensions/235x72?v=v2 "tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_Average_TimeGrouped.png")

The app calculates its reports using already existing Jira issue histories so when you install the app, you don't need to add anything to your issue workflows and you can get reports on your past issues as well. It supports both Company Managed and Team Managed projects for Jira Cloud.

Time in Status reports can be accessed through **its own reporting page, dashboard gadgets, and issue view screen tabs**. All these options can provide both calculated data tables and charts.

![Gadget_AverageStatusDurationByComponent.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/170017i541738A81A7EBA80/image-dimensions/165x135?v=v2 "Gadget_AverageStatusDurationByComponent.png") ![tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_Chart.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/170018i88B62F9CBD7B6C6E/image-dimensions/198x94?v=v2 "tisCloud_StatusDuration_LeadTime_Chart.png")

<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211756/>

EmreT


author: Peter James
body: This is similar to [my request](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery/Time-since-last-updated/td-p/2405212#U2406756) for the same thing with the time since an idea was last updated. I also created an automation to do something similar, but this has the same issue whereby it updates the Updated field and so stops the whole exercise from working.

I'm not sure if you need a field that actually shows the number of days or if you could just format the Created field based on the number of days since it was created, e.g. color it green for the first 14 days, then yellow for days 15-30 and then red over 30 and then red plus an emoji over 60 etc.

There are formatting options on the Created field (as there are for Updated) but the same issue is the case for both where the calculation used is for the number of days until the field value - which will always be a negative number in these cases, but the rule won't allow negative numbers.

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: There's no way to do this usefully in Cloud, exactly because of what you say - an Automation or script will update the issue, and hence set the "last updated date" to "now".

What we need is a field that won't trigger the issue update change. Scriptrunner's scripted fields can do that, but only on DC.

The only way we can look at age at the moment is to report on issue lists, sorted by updated.