The Ultimate JQL Cheat Sheet

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A few days ago, Artemis II left Earth with four astronauts heading for the Moon — the first crewed lunar mission in over half a century. Watching that SLS rocket clear the tower, it's hard not to feel a pull toward the bigger question: what comes after the Moon?

At Orbiscend, we've been thinking about that question for a while. Not in a rocket-science way (we build Jira apps, not spacecraft), but in the way we name things. Our demo projects are called MARS, HERMES, and IRIS — because if you're going to stare at Jira boards all day, you might as well dream big.

So to celebrate Artemis II and the slow, stubborn human march toward Mars, we're publishing something we've been working on: The Ultimate JQL Cheat Sheet.

Why a JQL Cheat Sheet?

If you've spent any time as a Jira admin or power user, you know the pain. You need a specific filter — maybe all unresolved bugs assigned to your team in the current sprint — and you know JQL can do it, but you can't remember the exact syntax. Was it assignee in membersOf() or assignee = currentUser()? Does the date function start with startOfWeek() or startOfWeek(1)?

So you open a browser tab. You google "JQL date functions." You land on Atlassian's docs, scroll past three sections you don't need, and eventually find the one line you were looking for. Ten minutes later, you do it again for a different query.

We wanted a single reference that lives on your desk (or your desktop) — something you can glance at instead of Googling every time.

What's in the PDF

The cheat sheet covers JQL from the ground up in 15 color-coded, searchable pages:

• Native fields & operators — every field Jira ships with (status, priority, assignee, labels, fixVersion, and more) alongside the comparison, membership, and pattern-matching operators that work with them.
• Built-in functions — currentUser(),startOfDay(), updatedBy(), membersOf(), and the rest of the functions that come standard with every Jira instance.
• Real-world examples — practical queries you can copy-paste for sprint reviews, SLA tracking, stale issue detection, and team workload analysis. All examples use realistic project data (yes, from MARS, HERMES, and IRIS).
• Argon advanced queries — the 30+ JQL functions that Argon adds to Jira: childrenOf, parentOf, timeInStatus,regex, commented, worklog,attachment, fieldValue, math aggregations, and more. Examples below:

.....to see more, please check our Cheat Sheet. 

Why JQL Still Matters

It's 2026 and Jira has boards, timelines, goals, plans, and a dozen views that didn't exist five years ago. So why does a text-based query language still matter?

Because JQL is the most precise way to ask Jira a question. Every board filter, every dashboard gadget, every automation rule trigger — under the hood, it's JQL. When the drag-and-drop filters can't express what you need, JQL can. And the teams that know JQL well are the teams that get the most out of Jira.

Native JQL is powerful, but it has real limits. You can't query across issue hierarchies. You can't filter by how long something has been in a status. You can't search comment text or find issues with specific attachment types. These aren't edge cases — they're everyday questions that project managers and team leads ask constantly.

That's why we built JQL Argon. And the cheat sheet covers both: the JQL that ships with Jira, and the JQL functions that Argon adds on top.

JQL Argon Powerful Search 

A Small Thing, Done Well

We're not curing cancer. We're not going to the Moon (that's NASA's job, and as we saw, they're doing it). We make Jira apps. But we believe that the small things matter — that a well-organized reference document can save someone twenty minutes a day, and that twenty minutes adds up.

The Cheat Sheet is free. No trial period, no paywall, no "contact us for pricing." Enter your email, download the PDF, and if you're interested, we'll send you JQL tips and use cases every now and then.

And who knows — maybe one day, someone on a Mars mission will need to query their Jira board to find all unresolved issues in the HERMES project that have been in "In Review" for more than three Martian sols. When that day comes, we'll have a function for that.

Cheat Sheet you can find on our website.

Greetings
Bartek from Orbiscend OU