Sharing an experience -
We use JIRA extensively for few important projects in our company. The projects involve generating important reports which in turn is used by various stakeholders (the stakeholders being basic end-users of JIRA).
So for the reports we (like most people) use filters. Some filters can be straighforward using simple JQL queries, while others are complicated ones like nested JQL queries.
One of the scenarios that we faced recently was one of our reports started returning unexpected results (which till yesterday was returning perfect results). After much debugging we finally found that the filter used for the report (which actually was a complicated one with nested filters + queries) got corrupted. But no one is to blame here!!
REASON -
As the filter used was a nested one, it had references to other filters as well. We were using filter names in our report filter. Someone, by chance, created a filter with the same name as of the nested filters being used in our actual filter. We have our jira database linked to foglight, upon checking the foglight we were sure that the report filter started picking up the incorrect nested filter (the duplicate one created recently) which led to incorrect results being returned by ou actual filter.
Surely, it actually is difficult by the database to figure out which filter to use in case of duplicate ones, so obviously it picks up the most recent one - and I am totally in favor of it.
But as users we can be careful from our side to use the JIRA features extensively and accurately.
So, next time we use FILTER ID for our important reports in JIRA instead of using filter names.
Thank you!!
