How to find the issues which are not in closed status as of a date?

Question

I am trying a query to find how many bugs that existed on a certain date were not closed on that specific date.

the query project = proj and issuetype = Bug AND created < "2014/05/08" and status was not closed BEFORE "2014/05/08"

not giving the expected result. actually it's not returning anything.

I ran following on 8th of May, 2014:  project = proj and issuetype = Bug AND status != closed

and it returned 100 issues.  I expect when we run a query today using the "was not" clause for the same day, I should see the same number of issues. Am I right? or am I making silly mistake?

Jose M_ · Answer

Perhaps this work:
created < 2014-05-08 and Status not in (Closed) AND updated <= 2014-05-08

Joe Pitt · Answer

You would need to specify the field to be compared to the BEFORE date. Out of the box I don't think there is one. I routinely capture milestone dates in custom fields in my workflows so this kind of query can be run. You may be able to structure a query that looks at the history but I wouldn't know what fields to point you to.