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5 Times when Jira advanced searches are key to track projects

Leo D. Murillo
Dec 28, 2020 4:30:00 PM

Jira has a powerful search engine for issues; however, this does not apply to projects. It's the nature of the tool. The Jira search engine for projects it's more limited; that's why in this post, we will show you how Jira advanced searches are key when tracking projects.

The Jira search engine allows users to work with the issues they need to monitor their work within the tool properly; on the other hand, at the project level, the same searching engine presents fewer options, making tracking projects using Jira less effective. That's why we will explain how this engine works for basic and advanced searches and how to enhance them by adding a project tracking tool. Let's start with the basics:

How to search for projects in Jira?

This is the Jira search engine; as you can see below, it only incorporates a search box to search for projects by text and shortcuts, and it's only possible to classify projects according to their category or typology; therefore, that's the only way to search for them.

The point made before, How do we get to know which projects are ours? Or, How can we tell which Jira projects have the description missing? This is practically impossible to achieve without a proper project tracking tool like Projectrak (formerly Profields) due to Jira's limitations regarding projects' search.

How to search for projects in Jira?
The results table from Jira project searches doesn't offer any configuration or even the possibility to interact with projects.


How to optimize the Jira project search engine, then?

How to get Jira advanced searches for projects?
The Projectrak (previously Profields) List View allows centralizing your Jira project portfolio in one place.

With Projectrak, it's another story; as you can see above, you can improve not only the search engine (which is our main subject in this post), but you can also have a place to centralize the project information, get real-time project reports, it's possible to automate projects, and overall, control everything project tracking-related in Jira, Projectrak is a hub where you can view and work with Jira projects... but let's focus on the searches for projects you can perform with Projectrak. We will show you 5 examples of how to improve the control and monitoring of projects through advanced searches of Jira projects with Projectrak:

1. Search for the Jira projects you're leading

As a Project Manager or Product Manager, if you work with Jira, you are probably the Lead of at least one project. Is there a way to quickly find those projects? With Projectrak, using the currentUser () function, you'll be able to find the projects in Jira where you are the project lead.

How to search the projects by leader in Jira?


2. Find the Jira projects with empty properties

Imagine that you have poorly defined projects, or you need to find those projects where the responsible forgot to save the correspondent information; in those cases, you will need to search for Jira projects with the Empty property, that way, you'll find them:

How to search for projects in Jira with empty properties?In this case, we use the example when"Budget" is empty.


3. Search for projects in Jira that meet one criteria or another

Here we introduce the OR conditional. This conditional is useful when searches are made from the form. It allows adding different criteria where it's necessary that all of them are met, or if you need to indicate one criteria or another are met for the Jira projects you are looking for. The OR condition will be the one you will need:

Learn how to search for projects in Jira that meets one criteria OR another one
The OR conditional allows you to search for different criteria for the same search intent.


4. Search for projects that do not contain a text

Usually, when indicating specific criteria in the search engines, the results that match the search attempt will appear; with Projectrak, it is possible to search for projects that may not have (IS NOT) or don't match that criteria. For this, you must use the "! ~" Operator:

Learn how to search for projects in Jira with a missing textProjectrak allows looking for projects with a missing text within.



5. Search projects by their attributes, beyond their category or typology

As we mentioned at the beginning, natively, the criteria you need to search for projects in Jira are limited to category or typology, but Did you know it's possible to search for Jira projects by their status? With Projectrak, this is possible; you can create as many properties as your project's needs by later find them by the value you have granted to them on each property:

Search for Jira projects by attributes instead category or typology
Projectrak allows searching projects by their attributes instead of as Jira does it natively, by their category or typology.


There are specific gadgets for Jira Software users that allow you to track Sprints. In addition, by default, Jira (Software, Service Desk, and Core) includes gadgets that return accumulated information from the issues.


The search engine in Jira is vital for project monitoring.

In the following video, DEISER's Head of Products, Leo Díaz, walks you through each of the examples we just have shown; on the video, you'll learn, step by step, how to get the most out of Jira project advanced searches with Projectrak for Jira project tracking:

 

Having an advanced project search engine is key when tracking projects; if you have faced the limitations we have shown, remember:

  •   Projectrak allows you to search projects in Jira very dynamically and then share them as filters with different stakeholders.

  •    To search Jira projects with an empty property is helpful to avoid chaos and don't lose control of the information of your Jira projects.

  •    Improve Jira project searches by using the OR operator; it will allow you to do complex searches.

  •    Search for Jira projects that contain or don't contain a specific text; that way, you'll control better the nomenclature of your projects in Jira.

  •    Using the "autocomplete" feature instead of the advanced searches for Jira projects, you will get faster searches once you know your projects' different fields and values.

If you want to enhance your abilities by searching for your Jira projects using Projectrak, and you need to start finding projects faster and share them with your peers, we have prepared a cheat sheet for PQL for you to download below.

PQL_Cheet_sheet_Profields_3

The ultimate cheat sheet to PQL

Do you want to dominate the grammar of PQLs?

If you are using Projectrak and you want to get faster and specific results when searching for your projects in Jira, you must learn the grammar of the Project Query Language, a language we have developed to help you find your projects more effectively.

DOWNLOAD NOW

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