JQL: Issues with current status "To Do" not displayed in "status was 'To Do'"

[Wolfgang Landes]

Jira Cloud, classic software project with only 6 Issues on 'To Do'.

• status = 'To Do'     //Gives me 6 results
  
  
• status was 'To Do'     //Gives me 0 results

According to Documentation: 
The "WAS" operator is used to find issues that currently have or previously had the specified value for the specified field.
https://support.atlassian.com/jira-core-cloud/docs/advanced-search-reference-jql-operators/

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Wolfgang - I don't know if your project is Next-gen or not, but this bug might apply:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-21154

[Wolfgang Landes]

Interesting Bug, there are next-gen projects on the instance that share the status "To Do" as default status.

My project is a classic software project that used the bug tracking template, which also shares the default status as "To Do"

I changed the scheme to a workflow that starts with "Open" and the JQL: "status was open" gives the correct amount of results now.

So could it be that this bug you mentions not only screws the data for next gen projects, but for classic projects aswell if they share the same status name?

[John Funk]

Hmm, it might very well do that. Thanks for sharing your findings!

Can you click on the Accept Answer button above so we can close this one out for others? Thanks!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi there,

Our site admin just independently raised this as a defect to Atlassian yesterday, as it is breaking some marketplace vendors' dashboard gadgets that rely upon status and status category searches. 

The root cause appears to be a change where status ID numbers can be searched uniquely but status names are not resolving correctly to the scope of the rest of the issues in the filter; they evaluate to Null.  For example, everytime you add a Next-Gen project it appears to add new To Do, In Progress, and Done status values.  Now you have even more status values at a project-scope level, and those appear to confuse status name parsing for instance-level searches.

Still waiting to hear back from support on next steps.

@Wolfgang Landes so a work-around would be to use the status ID numbers in your JQL.  Your site admin can find those, or you may use a REST API call to list them all and pull out the ones you need: mySiteInstance.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/status

Best regards,

Bill