Becoming a JIRA Search Ninja - Basic searches

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JIRA is a cool tool but it becomes even cooler if you know how to leverage it's powerful search features! Some of you probably already discovered the powerful JIRA Query Language (JQL) and that's what this series of blogposts is all about. In the next few posts we'll cover:

• Basic searches in JIRA
• Advanced searches in JIRA (using JQL)
• History searches in JIRA
• The secret powers of JQL

Basic searches in JIRA

Searching in JIRA, how do I start?

Search Box

The most simple search feature in JIRA is the search box at the top right of your screen.

You can use this search box to:

• search a particular issue
  

  JIRAKEY-15

• search on text (searches in issue summary, description and comments)
  

  atlassian

• Finally, the field supports Smart Querying 
  

  my open bugs

  This will give you a list with all Bugs that are in the status Open and assigned to you

Search for Issues

When using the Search Box you might have already discovered that JIRA has many more searching capabilities than the ones described above. In the dropdown menu "Issues" you'll find an item.

In the screen that just opened you'll be able to easily filter issues based on the value(s) of certain fields. A quick example search:

You can filter on any field available in JIRA (depending on the selected project(s)).

Avoiding duplicate work, saving your search for later

Once you've configured a filter you can save it for later use.

Oh great, I've a saved a filter but I can't find it anymore.

No worries, the filter isn't gone. By default it should be in your list of favorite filterss. That's right, you have favorite filters!

When you open the Issues menu, your favorite filters are shown at the bottom of the list, below "Filters". If you have too many favorites you can simply click "more ..."

You can also find your favorite filters in the left sidebar of the search screen.

Sharing the love of filters

Once you've created an (awesome) filter it would be great if others could use it as well. But by default when you create a filter they're private. To be able to share the joy of a filter with others you'll have to give them permissions. How you can do so is briefly shown in the animation below:

I'm sharing the filter with all logged in users as this is the easiest. Don't worry this only allows the users to access the filter and not necessarily the issues that come out of it (that's managed by the project permissions). 

Questions/Problems?

Please checkout this page from Atlassian first: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver073/basic-searching-861257184.html#Basicsearching-troubleshootingTroubleshooting 

If that doesn't help, please use the comments.

[Theresa Marwah]

Great article  - that was the first confluence page that I read when I started using JIRA! (animated gif helps too! nice.)

[Zoltán Bölcs]

A nice introductory article about basics of searching. Thank you!