Finding things with JQL in Jira

[#1]

In today's highly unscientific survey, MOST people find not knowing field names to be the most frustrating part of finding work items in Jira... and to be honest, a few years ago I would have definitely agree with it!

Thats aid, this doesn't surprise me one bit. There are a few system-provided fields (looking at you Summary, Description and Key, however, there can be thousands of custom fields. Even better, those fields will differ by instance, so if you do manage to learn them at one job all that knowledge is useless in the next one.

This makes it incredibly hard for someone who doesn't both know the instance AND know JQL to find things.

Here's some tips to master that frustration:

1. Make time to explore work items. This will give you an idea of what field(s) you can expect on different types, which can make it much easier to find things as you go.
2. Keep an work item open when you are building queries. This will make it easy to reference available fields. I frequently do this - even in projects I'm familiar with - as things can change, and there's a LOT of fields out there.
3. If you see duplicative field names run a search on one of them with "and project = (name of the project your work item is in)". This way if the field isn't in your project, you won't get any values. This takes a small amount of time, but can help you determine which custom field is the real one.
4. Use auto-complete to find the "cf[#####]" name. This is how Jira references that field, and will uniquely identify it in search. Instead of using the "human readable" field name, use the cf one instead - you'll nail it every time.
   

What tips do you have on overcoming this frustration (or others)? Share below!

Check out my latest session on JQL (Below) and this Udemy course for a full-length learning experience on JQL and finding things in Jira.

[Debbie Jolley]

Nice article Rob :-)

One other trick I use is to run a basic query on a project then export ALL FIELDS to a csv - and scoot across the excessively large number of columns to find some of the more obscure fields.  This can be particularly useful for pesky fields that are only exposed on very specific issue types and/or projects