30+ New Ways to Search Jira: Every Argon JQL Function, In One Place

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New Ways to Search Jira

Native JQL is great at answering "what is the current state of this issue?" It's much weaker at answering "how did it get there, who was involved, and how does it compare to everything else?".

That second category is what JQL Argon Powerful Search was built for.
It adds 30+ new ways to search Jira  
- 17+ JQL functions 
- 13 entity properties

— all typed directly into the same search bar you already use, no separate UI or export step required.

Below is the full list, grouped by what each group of functions actually helps you do.

Links & Hierarchy

Native JQL's parent = only works one issue at a time. These functions work across an entire subquery — hundreds of epics, or every issue matching a condition — instead of one at a time.

• linksQuery — find issues that link out to issues matching a subquery,
• linkedByQuery — find issues that are linked from issues matching a subquery (the reverse direction),
• childrenOf — find all children (stories, subtasks) of issues matching a subquery, across multiple parents at once,
• parentOf — find the parents (epics, stories) of issues matching a subquery — useful for surfacing "which epics have blocked children".

Time in Status

Jira shows you the current status. These functions tell you how long an issue has actually spent there — the missing dimension for bottleneck and SLA analysis.

• timeInStatus — filter issues by how long they've spent in a given status, with a threshold,
• timeExpression — compare against Argon's built-in Time in Status fields, which are calculated automatically for every status on every issue.

Change History

Every status change and field update is logged in Jira — but native JQL can't query that history directly. These two functions turn the changelog into something searchable.

• transitionedBy — find issues transitioned to a specific status, within a date range, optionally by a specific person — an instant audit trail for approvals, sprint retrospectives, and workflow compliance,
• changedBy — find issues where a specific field was modified within a date range, optionally by a specific person.

Activity Search

Status fields only show the current state. These functions search the activity around an issue — the comments, attachments, and logged work that usually only live in scrolling and exporting.

• commented — find issues with comments matching an author, date range, and/or keyword,
• attachment — find issues with attachments matching an author, date range, filename, or file type,
• worklog — find issues with logged work matching an author, date range, or amount of time — with no cap on how far back it searches (native JQL's worklog fields only scan the 100 most recent entries per issue).

Math & Field Comparisons

Capacity planning and estimation reviews usually mean exporting to a spreadsheet. These functions do the math inside JQL, against a dynamic set of issues.

• average — compare a numeric field against the average across a subquery (e.g., story points above the sprint average),
• maximum — compare against the maximum value in a subquery,
• minimum — compare against the minimum value in a subquery,
• fieldValue — compare a field on one issue against a field on related issues (e.g., time spent vs. original estimate),
• fieldCount — filter by how many values a field or property holds (e.g., issues with 3+ labels, 2+ attachments),
• regex — full regular expression matching on any text field, well beyond native JQL's fuzzy ~ operator,

Sprint Functions

Shortcuts for the sprint you actually care about, relative to a board, without hardcoding sprint names.

• currentSprint — issues in the active sprint,
• previousSprint — issues from the most recently closed sprin,
• nextSprint — issues in the next upcoming sprint.

Entity Properties (Searchable Keywords)

Alongside the functions, Argon indexes 13 entity properties you can reference directly as JQL keywords — no function call needed. These include link metadata (linksNumber, linkedByNumber, linkedByIssue, linkedByStatus, linkedByCategoryName, linkedByPriority, linkedByIssueType) and hierarchy metadata (childrenNumber, childrenIssueIds), so you can filter on "issues linked by a Done issue" or "epics with more than 3 children" as plainly as any native field.

Why it's all native JQL

Every one of these functions accepts a full JQL subquery as an argument, so they nest with everything you already know — project filters, sprint conditions, priority checks, and each other. They're not a separate query language bolted on top; they're JQL, extended.

And it all runs 100% inside Atlassian Forge — no external servers, no API tokens, no data leaving Jira. If Atlassian Cloud is already approved in your organisation, Argon already is too.

Argon Powerful JQL Search is available on the Atlassian Marktplace: JQL Argon 

Which of these functions would close the biggest gap in your current JQL setup?

Drop it in the comments — happy to share a worked example.

Enjoy!
Orbiscend Team (JQL Argon app provider)