Inactive Project Bucket Distribution(5.10.4)

Every project that has ever emitted activity is placed in one of six buckets. Four are based on how long it has been since the last event we saw for it — active (<=90 days idle), slowing (90-180 days), dormant (180-365 days) and abandoned (365+ days). Two are lifecycle states reported by Jira and outrank recency, because how long ago a project last emitted an event says nothing about whether it still exists — archived (removed from active use but recoverable: soft-deleted into the trash, or archived) and deleted (permanently removed). The horizontal bar shows the count per bucket; the legend underneath calls out the color key so you can scan the distribution at a glance.

What you can conclude

• A high dormant or abandoned share usually means the project picker and JQL filters return stale results — a cleanup pass typically pays back quickly in less noise across reports.
• A populated archived bucket is healthy: it shows the team is closing out projects properly rather than leaving them lying around.
• If everything dormant sits in abandoned (nothing in archived), the team is letting projects go silent instead of formally archiving them — that is its own hygiene issue.
• A concentration of dormant projects with the same prefix or product line may point to a structural change worth flagging (team disbanded, program ended).
• Projects in the deleted bucket no longer exist in Jira. They stay on the chart because the events they emitted are still part of the record, and a reviewer asking what happened to a project needs to see that it was deleted rather than find it silently missing.