Jira Confluence Tips 2 : Benefits and Limitations with Jira Labels
Continuing from first blog for Jira & Confluence tips, I am going to touch upon Jira Labels today. While I have been using Jira for over 5 years now, I could only reflect upon the power and challenges that lie within the use of Labels in my current assignment.
What are labels?
Labels are simply attributes on Jira issue types like Epic, User Story, Task, Bug to name a few.
Labels help cluster issues which can be used by teams for grouping a set of similar issues together so as to retrieve these issues together in a rather straightforward manner, not created under the same Epic.
Users can simply type in the Label they want to use while creating / updating an issue. If Jira finds a matching label, the user can proceed to select the same else it would show an option to create one, as shown below.
Benefits of using Labels
- Labels are accessible to anyone having access to a Jira instance, so it is universally available to all people using that Jira.
- Labels, as stated above, are very easy to create and use.
- Labels can be used in various ways to filter issues on delivery boards and dashboards in Jira.
Limitations with using Labels
- Since labels are created as , when you manually type in, there exists cases when you can end up creating multiple labels with the same name (but different cases) which causes confusion when needing to map these to issues.
eg. PerformanceTest, Performancetest.
- While JQL is considered case insensitive, however, there are few instances ,
- For example, using the Pie Chart gadget on Jira dashboards, labels with same spelling but different cases would be treated as different and hence, distorting the numbers , shown through the same.
- Suppose you created 10 issues with label PerformanceTest, 5 issues with label Performancetest , you would have wanted 15 issues to be shown together but due to differences in case, it would be two separate entries on Pie Chart.
- More than 1 label can be associated with an issue type which is itself a cool feature but becomes problematic when trying to visualise information on Jira Dashboards since issues would be shown against each label, though the total count of issues would remain the same.
- Suppose a User Story was tagged with labels — TeamA, Release2.0 ,Medium
- In this case, creating a 2-D filter view on a Jira dashboard, the same issue would be reflected across these 3 labels which may not always be the intention.
Tips of using Labels in Jira
Till now, we have understood what labels are, their advantages and limitations, listed below are a couple of cool topics which have been pretty helpful for me.
Removing a Label from all associated issues
Consider a case where you had created label TeamA to associate to all Team A’s issues but someone mistakenly also created teamA. Now you want to remove the label — teamA and have all Team A’s issues associated with TeamA.
1. Search for all the issues with the label as TeamA/teamA. Using any of the labels would retrieve the same no. of results.
Sample Query- project=<your Jira project name> and labels in (teamA)
2. Check if you have a TeamA label(label you want to keep) associated with all issues.
3. Else if you remove teamA label where it’s the only associated team label on the issue, you would not be able to associate that issue back to TeamA’s work easily.
4. If issues found in (3) > 0, update issues where label is teamA only with additional label TeamA. You can do it via bulk update or manually.
5. Once the above is done successfully , you can go ahead with a bulk update / manually to remove the teamA label for issues searched by Step 1 above.
6. Once you move to Edit issues, you can select the option below to remove the teamA label.
7. This should get rid of the teamA label for all issues & this label would no longer be available after that.
Case Sensitive Search
In the first tip, with the first query, you would run into an issue of identifying which issue has association with which labels — teamA or TeamA, as the above query treats labels as case insensitive and would return the same results using either of them.
In order to resolve this issue, you can refer below query to find issues matching case.
issueFunction in issueFieldMatch(“labels is not empty”,labels,”tech”)
Bonus Tip:
When creating Jira Dashboards, default permission to board and queries used in gadgets lies with owner, make sure to provide access to both the board and the Jira queries for your intended group to be able to access and view data on the dashboards, I would return with a more detailed explanation on Jira Dashboards as part of this series.
References