If you've ever tried to pull up all the tickets that Sarah Mitchell worked on last year, you've probably started with the obvious query:

assignee = "sarah.mitchell@example.com"

And then realised it only shows her current tickets — not the ones she handed off to Tom Bergkamp or closed six months ago.

Here's the fix.

The was operator

Jira's JQL has a was operator that checks the change history of a field, not just its current value. So to find every issue Sarah was ever assigned to:

assignee was "sarah.mitchell@example.com"

Simple, but powerful.

Checking multiple people at once

Need to audit the work of an entire sub-team? Use was in with a list:

assignee was in ("sarah.mitchell@example.com", "tom.bergkamp@example.com", "priya.nair@example.com")

This returns any issue that was assigned to any of those three people at any point in time.

Scoping to a specific year

Combine it with the during clause to limit results to a time window — useful for annual reviews, retrospectives, or handover audits:

assignee was in ("sarah.mitchell@example.com", "tom.bergkamp@example.com") during ("2025-01-01", "2025-12-31")

This only matches issues where one of them was the assignee at some point during 2025 — even if the ticket has since been reassigned or closed.

Putting it all together

A full, practical query might look like this:

project = "PLATFORM"
AND assignee was in ("sarah.mitchell@example.com", "tom.bergkamp@example.com")
AND during ("2025-01-01", "2025-12-31")
ORDER BY updated DESC

The was operator works on other fields too — status was "In Progress", priority was "High", etc. — so it's worth keeping in your JQL toolkit whenever you need to query history rather than current state.