Jira is such a lovely tool. Its search functionality requires you to understand JQL (Jira Query Language), which is a famously powerful and opaque language to help you find literally anything in its database of tickets. So you might have a need to find the tickets owned by someone who has left the company. That should be easy, right? Right? At first you’d think so, but then you don’t know Jira enough. Jira is only willing to help you when the users are active. For deactivated users – these are users with the (Deactivated) tag beside their name, you cannot find them in Jira by their username anymore. Here’s how to find them. I’ll be using a specific ex-employee in my screenshots as an example.
💡 TL;DR you need to use the user’s UUID in the search and ignore whatever Jira tries to “help” you with.
Find any ticket where this person is referenced. Then hover your pointer over their name to expose a tooltip.
Then click on the View Profile button.
Then note the URL you are sent to.
Then capture the UUID in the URL which is the unique ID for the user in Jira (yes, that’s a UUIDv4).
Then create a search query using assignee as the search filter and the UUID you captured as the value. DO NOT allow Jira to help you autocomplete the assignee value because it wants to give you names of active users, just ignore it.
Et voilà! You have the data you need on the deactivated Jira user.
💡 Pro-Tip: Given how unnecessarily complex this is, I suggest saving your search query as a Jira filter (name it something like “Scott’s Work”). That way you don’t need to remember this obtuse procedure.