Jira Snippet Library: JQL - Plans

Rachel Wright

A Jira Plan is a multi-space planning and forecasting feature available in Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise. Use them as another way to view work in progress, to plan and schedule future items for teams to work on, and to model if-then scenarios before selecting a specific path.

Data Source

All plans have a scope which defines how much data is included and where to get the data from. The source options are:

• one or more spaces,

• one or more boards,

• one or more filters,

• or a combination of the above.

A single plan can support up to 5,000 work items, 100 spaces, and 50 shared teams. But just because it can support 5,000 items doesn’t mean you shouldn’t segment your view to show the right information at the right time. I like to use a JQL filter so I can fine-tune the item list to exactly the information I’m tracking.

Here are some JQL queries to try in your plan:

All child work from a single item

• parent = ITEM-1

All child work from multiple items

• parent in (ITEM-1, ITEM-2, ITEM-3)

All child items missing a parent

• parent is EMPTY and type in (Epic, Story, Task)

Exclude items completed more than 7 days ago

Jira plans automatically exclude work after a set number of days. You can customize the number on the “Work in your plan” settings page (pictured) or in your source filter.

• resolved >= -7d

• status CHANGED TO "Done" AFTER -7d

Remove work completed more than 7 days ago

Target Start and End

Jira Plans relies heavily on the Target start and Target end locked date fields. Here are some date-related queries to try:

Work starting in 2027

• "Target start" >= "2027-01-01"

Work starting in 30 days

• "Target start" <= "30d"

Work missing a target end date

• "Target end" is EMPTY

Dependencies

Plans have a dependency view which visually indicates one item relies on another being worked or completed first. While Jira has many link types, like relates to, duplicates, and clones, the Jira Plans feature only recognizes the blocks link type by default. This is configurable however; a Jira administrator can specify additional link types if desired. But it’s good to know that all link types, regardless of their name, are treated as blockers in Jira Plans. Essentially, the Plans feature leverages a JQL query like:

• issue in linkedIssues(ITEM-123, blocks)

To find dependencies and linked work outside of the plans feature, use JQL queries like:

All linked work

• issue in linkedIssues(ITEM-123)

All linked work of a specific type
Ex: Find all items that depend on an item

• issue in linkedIssues(ITEM-123, “depends on”)

Ex: Find all items that are depended on by an issue

• issue in linkedIssues(ITEM-123, “is depended on by”)

Tip: Don’t forget to enclose all multi-word vales in quotes.

See Related

• Jira Snippet Library: JQL - Hierarchy

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