Target Start and Target End custom fields behave as though they were a day behind when system timezone is set to negative offsets

Summary

Jira issues may have a Target start and Target end date custom field. On Jira instances with the system time zone set to negative values, that is before GMT, when querying against these custom fields in the Issue Navigator using either Basic or Advanced search using JQL, these fields don't behave as expected when compared to Jira's own Date Picker and Date Time Picker custom fields.

Specifically, issues behave as though their Target start and Target end values are a day behind their actual value. Put another way, issues are only returned in the Issue Navigator if queries that query against these two date fields successfully include a date range for the day prior to the actual value.

The same problem appears in various places in Jira, not only in the issue search. Some examples include issue export, issue history, or Jira issue macros inside Confluence.

There is a similar problem with a different root cause with the Due date field that you can follow here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-73401

Steps to Reproduce

1. Start Jira with a system timezone with a "negative" timezone, for example, any timezone from the Americas
2. Identify an issue which has either Target start or Target end set. For the sake of example, let's say that an issue has a Target start of 2018/03/15.
3. In the issue navigator, attempt to search for this issue using any of the following JQL which we would expect would return the issue:

• "Target start" >= '2018/03/15'
• "Target start" = '2018/03/15'
• "Target start" > '2018/03/14'

Expected Results

The issue in question would be returned in the results.

Actual Results

The issue is not returned in the results. The issue will only return for any of the following queries that would return as though the Target start was actually 2018/03/14.

• "Target start" >= '2018/03/14'
• "Target start" = '2018/03/14'
• "Target start" <= '2018/03/14'

Workaround

Because the behavior is consistent in that the queries act as though the date were a day behind, JQL queries may safely be adjusted backward a day to compensate.

Alternatively, you can re-start your Jira instance with a non-negative timezone (for example GMT) and re-index affected issues.