Example JQL queries for board filters

You can use a JQL filter to make a board that shows the relevant issues based on whatever criteria you want. JQL is a flexible yet robust logic that can be used in a variety of different ways. Learn more about the power of JQL queries.

When constructing your JQL query, it’s important to tell Jira where it should search for issues by including or excluding specific projects or boards.

When a query has to search through fewer issues, results load faster.

Let’s say you want to view all the work assigned to you using a JQL filter. However, you only work on two projects within your entire organization.

This query works:

assignee is currentUser()

But this one is better:

project in (The Big Cheese, Project Kanban) and assignee is currentUser()

Why?

The first query searches through all of the issues in your site to find the ones assigned to you. The second query is more focused on your projects.

If your site has 10,000 issues Jira can look at the 500 issues in those projects and can ignore the remaining 9,500. Fewer issues to sort through, the quicker the query can run, even though the results are the same.

Here’s some other queries to help get you started

Show issues in different lifecycles

project in (LIFE) and status in ("In Progress", "To do") ORDER BY Rank ASC

Select all issues you are interested in

project in (LIFE) AND (assignee = currentUser() or reporter = currentUser()) AND (fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is empty)

Show all issues for a team (using a label custom field named “team”)

project in (LIFE) AND (team = ateam or team = dreamteam OR team = engineroom) AND (fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is empty)

Create a seperate board for completed issues

project in (LIFE) and status in (Done, Duplicate) and statusCategory = Done ORDER BY assignee

Use labels to organize by specific work streams

project in (LIFE) and labels in (ui-only, android-app) ORDER BY Rank ASC

Only show your bugs in a bug fix team

project in (LIFE) AND team = bugfix AND issuetype = bug AND (fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is empty)

Show all issues that are unscheduled or in an unreleased fix version

project in (LIFE) AND (fixVersion in unreleasedVersions() OR fixVersion is empty

Show all issues in the next fix version to be released

project in (LIFE) AND fixVersion = earliestUnreleasedVersion(PROJECT KEY)