Mastering Jira Filter By Labels : How to group and search issues by labels

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Jira Labels are a dynamic way to add tags or keywords to your issues to let you categorize and track them more flexibly which can significantly improve the organization, filtering, and reporting of issues within a project.

In this article, we’ll explore how to use labels in your Jira projects. You’ll also get recommendations for good practices and tips that will make this feature a real asset for your team.

Use case

Labels can be created by any user and they are particularly useful when there’s a need to track certain aspects of issues that don’t fit into a single component. 

 We’ll take the example of SAP Consulting company ABC, which offer consulting services. Their customer's project can have different components, for example Integration, Development , Configuration and data objects. These components create clear divisions within your project, but the project team might require further classification especially in the form of tagging to identify issues relating to a specific feature or isolate tickets in a support queue referring to a particular customer. This is where labels come in. 

 Jira Search By Label : Once you’ve added labels to your issues, you can use them in your JQL queries.

 Let’s say you want to find all the issue that are labelled with “frontend”. You can use this JQL query to find them:

• Jira Search By Label (JQL labels : Project = XYZ AND labels in (“frontend”)

Then you will get all issues that have the value “frontend” as a Label. This does not exclude issues that have other Labels values also.

What if we need to filter issues that have only one specific and no other labels? See below , we have some tips for you !

Jira does not provide a native method to filter for issues that have one and only one specific value in the Label fields. The only native method for doing that is to add another clause to the filter that enumerates all the other possible Labels value:

• Jira Search By Label (JQL labels): Project = XYZ AND labels in (“frontend”) AND Labels not in (“labelvalue1″,”labelvalue2″,”labelvalue50”,…)

It’s not an ideal solution because any authorized user can add labels to an issue as long as the label field is available on the issue. Consequently, it’s easy to end up with a very large number of labels. The danger here is that the project can end up with numerous capitalization and spelling variations, e.g., login vs. Login, user vs. User, ready_for_UAT vs. ready_for_uat, etc. This can, in turn, render searching via labels inefficient and prone to error. Below, we’ll share some best practices for avoiding this situation.

How to Take advantage of the benefits of labels and minimize potential pitfalls !

Colored Label Manager allow you to visualize and manage both Jira labels and custom label fields per project or globally in one place with at-a-glance quickness to save time and avoid mistakes. 

Option 1 : 

• Filter issues that have one and only one label (see screenshot)

Option 2 :

• Define all your possible labels and restrict your label field

Colored Label Manager fields are smart fields that can be used either as a label or a select list fields , the project administrator can choose to :

Allow teams to define labels , empowering them to work independently and save time. 

OR

• Restrict the label field, define needed labels and let the team us the field as select list or smart checklist.

There’s absolutely no coding required and certainly no need to learn Jira Query Language (JQL) for that matter.

With built-in reports, View the Issues by Labels report, Labels in Time report, or Most used labels report. Get deeper label usage insights in moments without leaving the app.

View in Marketplace 

Using labels in Jira the right way never was this easy!

  If you have any questions or suggestions for the next topic please leave a comment below 

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