How do you sanity-check a Jira board before changing its filter?

When I touch a Jira board filter, I try to slow down for a few minutes first because a small JQL change can make work disappear from a team's daily view.

My usual checks are:

1. Save the current filter JQL somewhere before changing it.

2. Run the proposed JQL in issue search and compare the issue count.

3. Check whether the board has quick filters, swimlanes, or sub-filter behavior that might hide work.

4. Confirm the statuses still map cleanly to columns.

5. Ask one person who uses the board every day what they expect to see before saving.

Curious how others do this. Do you have a small pre-change checklist for board filters, or do you rely on testing in issue search?

4 comments

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When doing filter comparisons, I find that running a "diff filter" can be very valuable, especially when you're dealing with mission-critical visibility.

JQL: filter = "original filter name" AND filter != "new filter name"

This will show you any issues that you will be removing with your new filter, and you can flip the operators to see what issues will be showing up in your new filter that weren't in your original filter!

Like • like this

We have a standard board filter format we follow for our IT Projects, so changes are kept to a minimum. I would save off the original filter, get a count of issues, and then compare to the new filter. You can easily do a comparison of issues to see where you have a delta of issues and then dive into them to see where the difference is occurring.

Its great really fantastic 👏

Don't forget you have the possibility to use the sandbox. Clone your Jira project/space to the sandbox. The filter is manually or exported/imported.

Make all the changes with your partner/customer.
If the changes (filter, permissions, whatever) are fine, make the changes in production.
... The review before/after is easier for the partner/customer.

In the future a "deployment bridge" can make the production changes. Let's see how this will help!
https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Cloud-Admins-articles/Deploy-configuration-changes-from-Sandbox-now-in-Open-Beta/ba-p/3257493?utm_source=atlcomm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=immediate_general_article&utm_content=topic