Why is this JQL filtering out issues without a label?

[Esther Strom, ACP-JA]

I have the following filter:

(assignee = currentUser() OR Developer = currentUser()) AND assignee = currentUser() AND status not in (Closed, Done) AND project not in (Loyalty, JIRA) ORDER BY fixVersion ASC, status ASC, priority DESC

This works correctly. I now want to add a clause to exclude tickets with a certain label, so I did this:

(assignee = currentUser() OR Developer = currentUser()) AND assignee = currentUser() AND status not in (Closed, Done) AND project not in (Loyalty, JIRA) AND labels not in (jira-dev-test) ORDER BY fixVersion ASC, status ASC, priority DESC

Now it's filtering out issues with that label, but also filtering out all issues without a label. What am I doing wrong? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It's because most human languages are fuzzy and imprecise, and we translate badly when we're talking to the computers.

You have three possibilities here:

• No labels set
• Label jira-dev-test is present
• Labels are present (like penguin and flibble) but not jira-dev-test

Your clause is precise, but expressed in English, it says "look at the labels and tell me when jira-dev-test is not there".  If the issue has no labels, there's nothing to look at.  So it can't tell you that jira-dev-test is not there.  You need to catch the "no label" fact somehow, and the nice clear way to do it is:

 AND (labels not in (jira-dev-test) or labels is empty)

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Add "Labels is EMPTY" clause as well.

(assignee = currentUser() OR Developer = currentUser()) AND assignee = currentUser() AND status not in (Closed, Done) AND project not in (Loyalty, JIRA) AND (labels is EMPTY OR labels not in (jira-dev-test)) ORDER BY fixVersion ASC, status ASC, priority DESC