JIRA Label convention

Satish Swargam

Are there any naming conventions for JIRA labels?  Trying to find a way to standardize on label usage.

JIRA labels observe the following conventions:

• Case-sensitive: Labels are case-sensitive. Be consistent in the use of upper- and lower-case characters when adding labels to multiple tickets. For example, JIRA creates separate labels for the entries Catalog and catalog.
• Spelling: Spelling differences in labels affect search results in JIRA; for example, JIRA distinguishes pre-requisite and prerequisite as unique terms. A search on pre-requisite may retrieve different tickets than a search on prerequisite. 
  
• Single word: JIRA supports only single-word labels. If you must use more than one word in a label, create a compound word using a hyphen; for example, QA-plan or shoot-sheet. 
  For additional details about label conventions, see your project manager or supervisor. 
  
• JIRA labels are shared across JIRA projects.

 

Suggested JIRA label conventions:

• The labels should be unique and not conflict with other reporting.
• The labels should be short and not too wordy. The labels should aid in filtering issues effectively and multiple labels are acceptable.
  • Not preferred:
    • performance-scalability-reliability-and-regulatory-report
    • performance-and-scalability-report
    • performance-scalability-reliability-and-not-regulatory-report
  • Preferred:
    • performance
    • scalability
    • reliability
    • regulatory
    • report
• Use abbreviations for lengthy labels. A label should be at least 3 characters in length.
  • e.g., NFR (Non Functional Requirement)
• Use Pascal case, Hungarian notation, compounds, hyphenated compounds or snake case to separate words?
  • FunctionalRequirement (Pascal case)
  • functionalRequirement (Hungarian notation)
  • functionalrequirement (compounds)
  • functional-requirement (hyphenated compounds)
  • functional_requirement (Snake case)
• Avoid repetitions of the same word across labels
  • Not preferred:
    • NFR-source-ISO/IEC-25010
    • NFR-source-ISO/IEC-9126-1:2001
  • Preferred:
    • NFR
    • ISO/IEC-25010 | ISO/IEC-9126-1:2001

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Personally, I would simplify it further, as it's very clear that people trying to be clever with labels and tags wastes a lot of time and makes them wonderfully useful (this is not just an Atlassian thing)

Your statement "The labels should be short and not too wordy." really does ring true, and to do that, I would keep them *very* simple.  Lower case, alphanumeric or a hyphen (for separators), and of a restricted length.

To help users out, I'd want a system that

• Suggests similar labels to what they're typing
• Two layers - one predefined by administrators as "good" and then free-range on the rest
• A spelling check to suggest better words (not enforce, just suggest)
• Search should ignore hyphens

This is based on seeing a lot of systems using labels that are functionally useless because people use sentences, capitalisation and separators to try to make their labels unique or memorable, which defeats the whole purpose of them.