How to find flagged issues in your Jira project?

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If you’re working on some task and have some blocker to complete it, how to mark this issue as problematic? Sometimes it happens we need some resources or face a problem we never had before. In teamwork, it’s highly important to see the whole picture of your project. And Jira has a great solution for this problem. You can add a flag to the task if there are some difficulties at any workflow stage.

🚩 What is the flagged issue in Jira

A flagged issue in Jira means the user wants to emphasize its importance and show there are some blockers to completing it. The flag means that the issue can’t be processed at the moment. Flagged issues are visible for every team member. 

When you add or remove a flag from an issue, you can also write a comment. You might do this to explain why you are putting up or taking away the flag. 

After adding a flag, a ticket will be marked with a red flag and highlighted with yellow color.

🚩 How to add/remove flag for Jira tickets

There are two ways to add/remove a flag to your Jira issues. 

1. From the issue view panel: Open the issue ➡️ Click on the ellipsis ➡️ Add flag.

*Here, you can’t add comments.

2. Directly from the board: Right-click on the task ➡️ Select Add flag.

*You can add comments only when adding flags from the board view.

🚩 How to find all flagged issues in your project

The simplest way is to use JQL:

Flagged is not EMPTY

Flagged is EMPTY

Drawback: If you need to find issues that were flagged some time ago, JQL won’t help, as it doesn’t support searches for past actions.

In this case, you can use Issue History for Jira app. It allows you to find all changes for any standard or custom field. So, here you can see issues that are currently flagged and issues that were flagged in the past.

🗓️ How to find issues flagged in the past

1. Open the app. Install Issue History for Jira if you’re not using it already. Here you can get a 30-day free trial.

2. Filter issues by project, assignee, sprint, etc. In our case, we choose the project. Select date range if needed.3. Open Columns manager and add fields for which you want to monitor changes. For instance, Flagged issues.

All flagged issues we had for this week in the Marketing project are displayed in the report:

⏳ How much time was the issue flagged?

You can also define how long an issue was flagged. The time when the flag was added to the task and removed is recorded. It’s more convenient to calculate this time in Google Spreadsheets or Excel. 

Steps to do:

1. Open the plugin and export the report to CSV/Excel.

2. Calculate the difference between date when a flag was added and removed. You can use the Pivot table to choose specific values for raws (date, issue key, flagged) and subtract the time between two values.

Finding flagged issues and how long they were flagged will help to get valuable insights into your team's efficiency. You can inspect what issues were staying there for too long and caused some delays and improve your performance next time.

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How many flagged issues did you have this week or month? Would you like to find it out? You can try to follow this instruction with a free trial of Issue History for Jira.