Using a physical Kanban board with stickie-notes, eventually the stickie-notes will "decay" and fall off the board. A great indication that the ticket has been sitting on the board for way too long, and obviously it wasn't important enough to become urgent.

What if JIRA had a similar "decay" feature, where you can configure the 'half-life' of different classifications of issues...and these items that have decayed, or became stale, fall into a pane on the bottom of your screen that you can drag open - similar to a pile of stickie-notes that have fallen onto the floor.

The neat thing about this is, if an item has been stuck in a state that isn't an "end-point" (closed, open, etc.), then the status changes to the stale status and can be found easily in the slide-out pane at the bottom of the window.

You could do really neat things with this as well, like run reports on how many items become stale; easily communicate a list of items that need to be triaged/addressed; and also you have a way to visualize the items that aren't getting any attention.

It's somewhat of a cheek feature, but I think there is value in being able to quickly/easily visualize the work that is being abandoned. It will help the development teams so that the backlog doesn't get cluttered with items that never die...and it will help managers to make certain that items are walking through the process properly.

Let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you for building such awesome products!
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Matt Terry
mcterry@sep.com