Jira filter: epic in backlog but linked tasks in progress

Question

Hello,

we are currently working on a reporting dashboard to audit all projects we have in Jira. For this specific filter we want to know which epics are in status "backlog" or "open" but have linked issues which are "in progress"

I tried a few filters but the problem is that i had to give the query a specific epic link. Since we have hundreds of epics in dozens of projects i cant name them all, so I hope there is a solution with just one filter for all projects...

Thanks a lot for help

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Just to expand on the last point, this is how this would look in the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

Put simply, you'd create a sheet with all issues that are potentially relevant to you: i.e., any epics in "backlog" or "open", plus any issues that are "in progress". (Don't have worry about any parent/child relationships; JXL will sort this for you.). You'd then enable the default hierarchy (that's just two clicks) and hide any empty epics (that's another two clicks). This is how this looks in action:

Once you have your list of issues, you can work on these directly in JXL (much like you'd do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets), trigger various operations in Jira, or export them for further processing.

Any questions just let me know!

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Jan Eißing

welcome to the community!

Unfortunately, this is trickier than one might think; as a "hierarchical query", it would really require some kind of join or subquery, which isn't available in plain Jira/JQL.

A few directions forward:

* If it's a one-off thing, you could first query the relevant epics, and then use the keys of these epics in a second query, in an "Epic link" in (KEY-1, KEY-2, ...) clause.

If you want to run your search dynamically, without manually stitching two queries together, you'll need extra tooling:

* You might be able to use Jira Automation to "propagate" epic information down to the epic's children, and then use the respective field(s) on the children to include them into your filter. Obviously, this will add a fair bit of complexity to your system.
* There's different apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with that. First, there's a number of apps that extend JQL by additional functions, including hierarchy-related functions. JQL Search Extensions has been mentioned before; I've used it a few times and it works well.
* Alternatively, you could try one of the more hierarchy-focused apps from the Marketplace. These apps typically have their own ways of figuring out parent/child relationships between issues, and provide more powerful ways of searching through issue hierarchies. I myself work on such an app, in which your use case would be easy to solve - I'll provide more details below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

Charlotte Santos -Appfire- · Answer

Hi @Jan Eißing

I’m Charlotte, a support engineer at Appfire and I’m here to help you.

Unfortunately, using JQL of Jira, you’ll not be able to do it dynamically.

In the app where my team works, JQL Search Extensions for Jira, you can use this query to find all epics that are in status backlog but their children are in progress:

issue in epicsOfChildrenInQuery("status='In Progress'") and status=Backlog

Please contact our support if you have any other questions about this query.

We’ll be happy to help you!

Best regards,

Charlotte