Filters in Jira

 What are filters in Jira?

Lets say that you would like to adopt a cat (sorry dog lovers!). You go to the cat shelter. You look around and see lots of different breeds of cats: siamese, blue russian cat, short hair british, and etc. You are looking for a specific cat that is not older than a year, that is calmer than the other cats (trust me, there are no calm cats - especially if they sleep all day, brace yourself - they will awake you at 3 am), an orange cat (like a garfield almost), not really heavy (because there are heavy cats). 

All of this from above is almost the same thing when developers are filtering the issues in Jira. Each board in Jira is based on a specific JQL filter. Also, these filters can be controlled in a way, you can select (if you are the board administrator) who will be able to view and who will be able to edit the filter. In order to keep the developers focused (they are the coding folks without whom we wouldn't have anything really), quick filters can be created - this is for the company managed projects.

In team managed projects, instead of quick filters there are the custom filters that can be activated by clicking on the respective checkboxes. In order to see the quick filters present on the board, you would need to click on the three dots and toggle the quick filters on.

Quick filters are based on the JQL queries, which will well filter out everything that was defined in that query. For example: assignee = EMPTY AND issuetype = Bug, will list out all of the tickets where there are no assignees and also where the issue type is bug.