Finding stuck issues in Jira with JQL

Five queries that list the work nobody is moving, using nothing but Jira itself — and the point where a query stops being enough.

Not touched in two weeks

Anything still open that nobody has edited, commented on or moved for fourteen days, oldest first:

statusCategory != Done AND updated <= -14d ORDER BY updated ASC

"Updated" changes on any edit, so a single comment resets the clock. That is usually what you want: it finds the work nobody is even talking about.

In progress too long

Work that was started more than ten days ago and has not finished. statusCategoryChangedDate is when the issue last moved between To Do, In Progress and Done, so moving between two in-progress columns does not reset it:

statusCategory = "In Progress" AND statusCategoryChangedDate <= -10d ORDER BY statusCategoryChangedDate ASC

Filed, never started

The blind spot of most ageing reports, which only look at work in progress: issues filed a month ago and still waiting for someone to pick them up.

statusCategory = "To Do" AND created <= -30d ORDER BY created ASC

Nobody owns it

Open issues with no assignee that have been around for more than a week. Work without an owner is the most likely to be stuck, and the least likely to be noticed:

assignee IS EMPTY AND statusCategory != Done AND created <= -7d ORDER BY created ASC

Service desk queues

For a Jira Service Management project, the tickets waiting on your team rather than on the customer, oldest first. Replace SD with your project key, and the status names with the ones your project uses:

project = SD AND statusCategory != Done AND status NOT IN ("Waiting for customer", "Pending") ORDER BY created ASC

JQL rejects a status name that does not exist on your site, so remove any name your workflow does not have.

Put them on a dashboard

Run a query in Filters → View all issues, choose Save as, then add a Filter Results gadget to a dashboard and point it at the saved filter. To see who holds the stuck work, add a Two Dimensional Filter Statistics gadget on the same filter, with assignee on one axis and status on the other.

Where JQL stops

These queries find the right issues, but a list of them still leaves the arithmetic to you:

  • Dates, not ages. Filter Results shows when something was last updated, not how long it has been sitting.
  • Calendar days only. An issue picked up on Friday reads as three days old on Monday.
  • One cut-off. A single -14d says nothing about which items are only just late and which are far past it.
  • No direction. Nothing tells you whether the pile is growing or shrinking week to week.

Time in Status is the gadget we built for that: ages in working days, late and overdue zones that can come from your own team's pace, the change since last week on every figure, a 90-day trend and a CSV export — plus a panel on each issue showing how long it spent in every status, which JQL cannot tell you at all. It is on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Time in Status is made by Vudia. Questions about these queries: info@vudia.site.