Using JIRA labels

Mir picture Mir · Mar 21, 2012 · Viewed 27.4k times · Source

How do you use JIRA labels? We're kind of starting out with JIRA with a somewhat rusty team in terms of best practices, and it would mean alot to start off the right foot here.

Between components, projects and issue types, I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to best use labels without introducing redundancy; I had labels called "think-over" and "implement" to try it out, but it didnt feel natural. Complexity is something that could fit in, the kind of work to be done ("routine", "new stuff" etc) perhaps might be able to make it too; not much else I can think of.

How do you use them?

Answer

gareth_bowles picture gareth_bowles · Mar 21, 2012

To make things as clear as possible, I would only use labels to describe aspects of an issue that can't be described by other attributes such as issue type, component, version or environment. Complexity might be a good example, but the kind of work to be done sounds more like an issue type.

Depending on how many kinds of data you want to record in labels, it might be better to use custom fields; these have the advantage that you can give them a fixed set of values, whereas labels are arbitrary strings, so two people might use different labels to describe the same thing.