How to Search Jira Checklists with JQL 🔍 — A Deep Dive with Tick 🔍
If you’ve ever tried to find a specific checklist item across multiple Jira issues, you know the struggle. Jira’s native search is powerful for fields and comments, but it doesn’t natively search inside checklist items added by apps. You might be tracking Definition of Done tasks, QA test steps, or onboarding checklists, yet there’s no easy way to query, for example, all issues where a checklist item contains the word “release” or which issues still have unchecked tasks. That means teams often resort to manual tracking or simply miss things hiding in their checklists.
With Tick, that limitation is gone – to make every checklist item instantly searchable as if it were native Jira data. In this article, we’ll show how this feature works and how it solves the pains of missing information buried in checklists. (Even if you’re using a different checklist solution, read on – this will illustrate what’s possible with deep Jira integration.)
Why Tick’s Integrated Search is a Game-Changer
Imagine being able to treat checklist content as a first-class citizen in Jira search. With Tick’s JQL integration, that’s exactly what you get. Under the hood, Tick uses Jira’s issue entity properties to index checklist data — so you can query it with Jira Query Language (JQL) just like any standard field. In practice, this means you can:
- Find issues by checklist text – e.g., search for a keyword that might be in any task’s description.
- Filter issues by checklist completion status – e.g., find all issues where all tasks are done, or the ones that still have unfinished tasks.
- Filter by number of checklist items – e.g., find issues that have over 10 checklist items (perhaps indicating larger tasks).
This level of integration feels native to Jira. In fact, Tick’s search features are accessible right from the issue screen via a quick menu. No external reports or manual scanning – just use Jira’s own search bar or one-click shortcuts to get the answers you need.
Importantly, this capability is under your control: Jira admins can enable or disable the checklist search integration in Tick’s settings. So if you’re an Admin, you decide if and when your users can tap into these powerful searches. Now, let’s see how to use it in practice.
How to Use Tick’s JQL Search for Checklists
Step 1: Enable the integration (Admins) – To start using JQL search on checklist data, a Jira admin needs to enable Tick’s Jira Custom Field Integration in the app configuration. (This allows Tick to add its search index fields to your Jira instance.) It’s a one-click setting. If you’re an admin, go to Tick Configuration → General Settings → Jira Custom Field Integration and toggle on. Once enabled, Tick will begin indexing checklist content behind the scenes (you can disable it anytime if you choose, but most will want it on to unlock the features below.)
Image 1. – Admin control: enable or disable Jira Custom Field Integration in Tick settings (disabled by default).
Step 2: Quick-search from an issue – Tick adds a handy quick-search menu on each issue, so users can jump directly to common queries with one click. For example, while viewing an issue, open the Tick menu and you’ll see options like “Search issues by title”, “Search issues by complete”, or “Search issues by incomplete”.
Image 2. – Tick search quick access menu.
Selecting any of these will take you straight to Jira’s Issue Navigator with a pre-filled JQL query.
Example: If you click “Search issues by incomplete” on an issue, Jira will show all issues in the project where not all checklist items are completed. This uses Tick’s progressPercent field behind the scenes (more on that shortly). Your JQL query will look like progressPercent != 100.
Image 2.1 – Example of Search issues by incomplete.
The Issue Navigator shows all matching issues in the project. In the “Order by” panel, you can see the full list, and by clicking into any ticket you’ll immediately see which checklist items remain unfinished.
Step 3: Use JQL queries for advanced searches – You can also manually write JQL queries to harness the full power of Tick’s search integration. Here are the special JQL fields Tick makes available and how to use them:
- Search by Task Content: Use the field tasklistFullText to search for issues that have any checklist item containing specific text. For example, to find issues where a checklist task mentions “release”, you’d query: tasklistFullText ~ "release"
Image 3. – Searching for "release" returns the issues whose checklists include that term.
This will return any issue that has the word “release” in one of its checklist items – super useful for tracking deployment steps, audit keywords, or any consistent term in your tasks.
- Search by Completed Tasks: Use progressPercent = 100 to find issues where all checklist items are completed. This essentially filters for “fully done” issues (in terms of checklists). For instance, if you require all Definition of Done items to be checked before closing a story, this query helps you spot which stories meet that criterion.
Image 3.1 – Filter results showing only issues with 100% checklist progress – meaning every task checked off.
- Search by Incomplete Tasks: Conversely, progressPercent != 100 finds issues that are not fully complete (i.e. have one or more unchecked items). You might run this towards the end of a sprint or project to see which tasks are still in progress. It’s an easy way to catch any issue that might slip through with unfinished subtasks in its checklist.
Image 3.2 – Results for incomplete tasks – issues listed here still have pending checklist items).
- Search by Number of Tasks: Use the field tasksCount to query by how many checklist items an issue has. For example: tasksCount >= 7. Would find issues with seven or more tasks in their checklist. This can identify, say, particularly large stories or tasks (if a checklist is very long, maybe the issue is complex), or help balance workload by finding issues with too many subtasks.
Image 3.3 – Showing an issue filter for tasksCount >= 7, revealing issues that have seven or more checklist items).
These JQL queries can be combined with any other Jira filters – project, assignee, labels, etc. – like any native field. For example, you could search for all open bugs in Project ABC that have an incomplete checklist item mentioning “test”. The integration essentially extends Jira’s search to the granular level of checklist content, giving you unprecedented visibility.
- Example of an advanced JQL query combining multiple checklist fields.
Image 3.4 – Example of an advanced query combining multiple checklist fields (tasksCount, tasklistsCount, completedTasksCount, and progressPercent).
In this search, we’re combining four different properties at once:
- tasksCount >= 8 → show only issues that have at least 8 tasks.
- tasklistsCount >= 1 → ensure that at least one checklist exists on the issue.
- completedTasksCount >= 2 → filter for issues where at least 2 tasks are already completed.
- progressPercent >= 20 → only return issues that are at least 20% done overall.
This kind of combined query is powerful because it lets you refine your results. For example, you might use it to find larger stories with multiple checklists that are partially complete but not yet finished — so you can track progress without missing details.
Why This Matters (Real Use Cases)
Having the ability to search checklist content isn’t just a “nice-to-have” – it directly solves a number of common challenges for different teams. Here are a few scenarios where Tick’s JQL search integration can make a world of difference:
- Agile Development & QA: At the end of a sprint, Scrum Masters and QA leads often need to ensure no story is released with unmet acceptance criteria or undone tasks. By searching for progressPercent != 100 in the current sprint, they can instantly get a list of user stories or bugs that still have unchecked items (like a missed testing step or an unverified acceptance criterion). This proactive check helps avoid surprises during sprint review. Similarly, a QA engineer can search for a keyword like “bug” or “test” within tasks across issues to see if a known issue was mentioned in any test checklist – making it easier to trace where a potential problem might have been noted.
- HR Onboarding & Offboarding: HR teams using Jira for onboarding can benefit hugely from content search. For instance, if every new hire issue has a checklist item “Laptop delivered to employee”, an HR manager could run a quick JQL search for tasklistFullText ~ "Laptop delivered" across all open onboarding tickets. Any results missing that item (or showing it incomplete via progressPercent != 100) tells them which new hires still haven’t received their equipment, without having to open each issue. It brings consistency and speed to tracking repetitive processes across many issues.
- Audit, Compliance & Support: Consider a support team handling customer requests with specific steps that need client approval. Using Tick’s Interactive mode (which we covered in another article) the client might tick off “Confirmed by client”. Now internally, a manager could search for all resolved tickets where “Confirmed by client” was not checked, to identify which resolutions might still lack client confirmation. In compliance scenarios, if an audit requires certain checks (e.g., “Security review completed”), you can search for that phrase in all issues over a period to ensure no required step was omitted. This level of traceability is a lifesaver during audits or post-incident reviews.
In all these cases, the ability to query checklist data across issues turns what used to be a manual hunt into a quick search. Teams save time, avoid oversights, and gain confidence that nothing is slipping through the cracks hidden in an issue’s subtasks.
Under the Hood: Performance and Control
You might wonder, how is this all possible without slowing Jira down? The magic is in Jira’s own architecture – Tick stores checklist info in Jira’s index via issue entity properties. This means the searches you run (like tasklistFullText ~ "X") are executed by Jira’s native search engine, which is optimized for speed. There’s no external processing or long delays; if anything, it behaves like searching a custom field. Atlassian designed JQL and the index to handle large amounts of data, and Tick plugs into that reliably.
Additionally, all of this is secure and permission-respecting. If a user doesn’t have access to certain issues, those won’t show up in results (just like any JQL search). And if you have checklist items that are hidden from certain roles (Tick allows visibility control on checklist items), those items’ content won’t be searchable by the people who shouldn’t see them. Essentially, the integration inherits Jira’s permission scheme and Tick’s own visibility rules, so you can confidently use it even in sensitive projects.
And remember, if for some reason you don’t want this feature, admins can turn it off with a click. We made it opt-in to ensure you’re in full control. That said, most teams enable it once they see the value, and the overhead is minimal.
A Handy Addition to Your Jira Toolkit
As teams grow and projects get more complex, the little things – like a missed checklist item – can have big consequences. Tick’s JQL search integration ensures you have full visibility into those little things, at scale. It brings the convenience of Jira’s powerful search to the world of checklists. This is particularly useful for:
- Preventing oversights – e.g. quickly find any issue missing a critical step before it’s too late.
- Workflow enforcement – e.g. confirm all “Definition of Done” checklist items are completed before closing stories.
- Audit readiness – e.g. retrieve a paper trail of who did what via tasks (since each checklist item action is logged, similar to issue history).
By embedding these capabilities natively, we’ve tried to make Tick not just a checklist tool, but a seamless extension of Jira that amplifies your productivity. You don’t have to learn a new interface or run separate reports – just use the Jira search you’re already familiar with, now supercharged with checklist intelligence.
Learn More: Tick – Checklist for Jira Cloud is available on the Atlassian Marketplace. You can try it for free and see how it integrates into your workflow. We built Tick to feel like a native part of Jira, and this search feature is a prime example of that philosophy in action.
Have you ever needed to search through checklist items in Jira? We’d love to hear your thoughts or any creative use cases you envision – share your ideas or questions in the comments below!
đź“š More from Tick:
- How to Create Powerful Checklists âś… in Jira (2025 Guide).
- Mentions vs. Assignments: What Every Jira Team Should Know.
- How to Let Your JSM Clients Collaborate on Checklists — A First on the Marketplace.
- From Checklist Item to Jira Issue in One Click — How to Save Time and Keep Context with Tick.
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Mariia Novhorodtseva _ Tick - The Ultimate Checklist for Jira
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