JQL query to search for the person doing the update of a jira issue

[Kirsti Zoechling]

I am looking for a field or a function to figure out via JQL the person doing the update of a Jira issue. Any ideas? Thank you

[Daniel Turczanski - JQL Search Extensions]

Hi,
@Andy Heinzer described what can be achieved with standard JQL. 

Standard JQL doesn't easily allow it but the results can be quickly found using our professional indexing service JQL Search Extensions. You can simply search for:

lastUpdatedBy=currentUser()

You can read more in our docs.

I hope this helps!
Daniel

[Andy Heinzer]

Time for an updated answer. My previous reply as accurate at the time, but it's been 3 years, and Jira has made some improvements in this area.

If you are using Jira Cloud, there is a relatively new JQL function you can use called updatedBy().  More details in https://support.atlassian.com/jira-core-cloud/docs/advanced-search-reference-jql-functions/#Advancedsearchingfunctionsreference-updatedByupdatedBy--

Jira Server and Data Center 8.x and higher also have this feature as you can see in https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver080/advanced-searching-functions-reference-967899663.html#Advancedsearchingfunctionsreference-approverupdatedBy()

However older versions of Jira, such as 7.13 do not have this function out of the box, and yes to find this level of information in those older versions of Jira would typically require a plugin to be able to see.

But for Jira Cloud or Jira 8+ users, you can use a JQL query such as

issuekey IN updatedBy(jsmith)

Which can then return to you all the issues updated by that specific user account.  You can also go further to find issues updated by someone on a specific day

issuekey IN updatedBy(jsmith, "2018/06/01")

or between two specific dates:

issuekey IN updatedBy(jsmith, "2018/06/01", "2018/08/31")

I know this is not exactly the same as seeing a "Last updated by" field attached to an issue that some plugins can provide for Jira, but this function can still be useful to see when users are making updates to issue even if they are not an assignee or reporter on the issue itself.

Andy

[Alex Fox]

Nice! Thanks Andy

[Alex Fox]

I know there hasn't been an answer on this in three years, but for posterity's sake, it's worth saying that it's not possible with out-of-the-box JQL. You'd have to use a post function on every transition in every workflow to write to a custom field (with an app such as JSU) in order to be able to track the "last updater" of an issue.

[Alexey Matveev]

What do you mean by "doing an update"? 

[Andy Heinzer]

I think the desire here is to see the editor of the issue. So if a user updates a field, they want to see via JQL a means to search that information.

the problem here is that Jira's JQL does not return user accounts.  It returns Jira issues.  In turn it can return any field on that issue.  But that typically limits the user fields on an issue to reporter and assignee.  Technically any user with permission could have made the change in question.  So really you would have to look through the issue history in order to see who changed what on an issue.  Which is not always an ideal method.

Perhaps there might be a plugin that could do this for Jira, however from looking at the top rated search enhancement plugins for Jira on Marketplace (ie Scriptrunner, JQL tricks), I could not find any of these that appear to offer this specific function to Jira.

Sorry this might not help, however if another user finds a JQL solution to this, I'd love to know about it too.