Inventory

Why inventory matters

Every story that has been deployed but not released is unreleased inventory. This is waste.

Unreleased inventory carries real costs. Feature flags stay in the codebase longer than they should. The team loses track of what is actually live. A rollback becomes risky because it might affect deployed-but-unreleased work that nobody remembers is there. The longer code sits unreleased, the harder it becomes to release at all.

The inventory view makes this visible. The goal is an empty inventory. Inventory tracking is a core part of practicing Continuous Delivery.

The bands

Inventory groups unreleased stories into three bands based on how long they have been deployed without being released:

• In Flight (0-3 business days) - normal. The release is being coordinated.
• Aging (4-9 business days) - worth noticing. The release decision may be stalling.
• Stale (10+ business days) - a decision nobody made. Indicating risk.

Default thresholds are 4 and 10 business days. These are configurable per team in Settings because every team's rhythm is different.

Cleanup

A released story still carrying a decoupling tag (FF, BBA, DL) means the flag or abstraction is still in the codebase. The feature shipped but the scaffolding was not yet removed.

The Flow charts show how work moves through the system over time, complementing the inventory snapshot.