The Feature Flag Staleness Budget

How many stale flags is too many? The 30-day budget, the dashboard, and the policy that keeps feature flag debt bounded.

What 'stale' means

100% on for 30+ days, OR 0% on for 30+ days. The flag is no longer doing experimentation work.

Excludes intentionally-permanent flags (kill switches, regional toggles). Tag those at creation.

Auto-detected: a flag is moved to the stale list automatically; owners see it in their dashboard.

The budget

20 stale flags total. Above that, no new flags can be created.

Why 20: empirical. Below 20 the team can clean up reactively; above 20 cleanup never happens.

Budget hits trigger a sprint to clean up. Forced cadence.

Dashboard

Total flags, total stale, owners with most stale flags. One screen.

Quarterly trend: are stale flags growing or shrinking? Growth is a signal of process erosion.

Linked from the flag platform. Engineers see it before creating new flags.