Jira Tips: How to Stay On Top of Your Backlog in 3 Easy Steps

In this post I show you how to get email updates on important changes in your backlog.

Keeping track of all changes in your backlog can be tedious work, but staying on top of important events and changes in your backlog is essential as a product owner.

An excellent way to tracking changes is to set up an email subscription for recent updates. In Jira you can create an email subscription from any filter. Constructed properly it can alert you of created and updated issues in your backlog(s).

So how do you do it?

Step #1: Search for Issues

Filters are created based on searches, so the first thing we need to do is decide what issues we want to show up in the filter.

Here is a search query to list issues in the specified project that was updated in the last 24 hours. (The reason for the time span will become clear in step 3.)

project IN (<PROJECT-KEY>) AND updated >= -24h

Another example that looks for any items created the last 24 hours. It also excludes any item created by the current user (i.e. you).

project IN (<PROJECT-KEY>) AND created >= -24h AND creator != currentUser()

A third example listing items where the status changed.

project IN (<PROJECT-KEY>) AND status CHANGED AFTER -24h AND NOT status CHANGED BY currentUser()

Step #2: Create a Filter

Now you need to create a filter. This is done by clicking 'Save as' from the search view.

Step #3: Create the Subscription

Next, when you have saved the search or searches (either as separate filters or as a combined search - I prefer the former), it's time to create subscriptions.

You do this by opening the filter and clicking on "Details" next to the filter name, and then on "New subscription".

From the subscription dialog you can set the schedule and interval. I usually opt for "Daily". That's the reason for the "updated" clause in the queries: you only want items that changed since the last email. (If you set up a weekly subscription you want to change the queries to for example updated >= -7d where d stands for days.)

There you have it. You will now get emails when something important happens in your Jira backlog.

Final Thoughts

Jira filters and subscriptions are powerful tools, and can be used for many things. This post showed you how to get started. Experiment with other queries and subscriptions!

Please share if you have other useful filters, or if you want ideas for how to create other searches.