How effective are labels for reporting?

[vildana_ermaya]

On my small IT team we have what seems like an ever-growing list of labels which are hard to manage and just as hard for new hires to understand. We have labels for what department in the company is impacted, what system is impacted, what team on IT (frontend, backend, product) is impacted, what project, and then the type of request!! So as you can image one story can have multiple labels! 

I'm curious as to if there are non-label options in Jira for reporting that would help or even how other places manage reporting in Jira. Overall, how to just simplify what we're doing. 

Would love to hear your feedback, thanks!!

[Liam Green]

Hi @vildana_ermaya 

We don't use labels at all, for all of the reasons stated above.

We use custom fields to track the information - e.g. category, business area affected.  It works well for us and allows more automation within the service desk

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Hi @vildana_ermaya 

As @John Funk suggested don't rely on labels for proper reporting. Treat them as free tags that you can enter on the issue for further classification but don't rely on them for accurate reporting. Some examples are - adding a label on the issue as a result of a transition or some automation. I personally use label when I perform bulk update on issues, so I have one more additional information associated with the issue which can be really useful when reverting the bulk changes.

I hope it helped.

Ravi

[Liam Green]

Hi @vildana_ermaya 

We use a simple drop down menu for business area, as we categorise based on which area the person reporting the issue works in.  We also have a cascading two field list for the category.

One of our teams assigns ticket based on business area, so its great for automation as it auto-assigns the ticket based on the business area that the customer chooses.

Hope that helps!

[Konstantin Nazarov]

There is another problem with labels. They are displayed on the “board” and their visibility  cannot be controlled from Jira. They increase the block size in height and the readability of the board decreases. This effect will negatively affect the effectiveness of team management. The labels impair the perception of the “Board”. In the process of managing a team, their visibility must be controlled. IMHO, that would be correct by Jira. There is not enough "hide" checkbox to control it visibility. IMHO, it's worth asking Jira developers about it. As I understand it, your account allows you to submit such an message to Jira support. If you do that, and they will add a checkbox to control the visibility of labels, that's will be great.

If Jira has a tool like label, but there are obstacles to using it in full functionality, then this should be reported to the developer, if possible. The modern concept of quality and quality management ISO 9000 is based on the principle of feedback and customer satisfaction.

At the same time, some sections of the description of elements for the user are not displayed (at all) in the web interface. I cannot make the description of an any item with Jira so that the description is displayed. Have you faced this problem? 

[John Funk]

Hi Vildana,

For me, using labels for reporting is a terrible idea because they are case sensitive and typos/abbreviations/mixed case, etc. can happen too easily. 

I would use Components and/or Issue Types to provide the best clarity for reporting.

[vildana_ermaya]

Hi @Liam Green

I love the idea of a custom field for the business area affected. I think that would help our team a lot instead of having a bunch of labels. Curious as to what field type you use for the business area affected, if you don't mind sharing. Thanks!

[Konstantin Nazarov]

@vildana_ermaya 

I don't know if such a Jira feature is available for a project of any kind. I have a next generation Jira Scrum type project. In the issues settings, you can create a new class of objects, at the same level as story and task. You can give it absolutely any functionality. You just have to tell the team in your regulations how you describe the use of these objects in your project. If the team knows which object is needed for what, then they will benefit from these objects.

Now I have a set up environment for a freelance development team. There is no team yet. A clean project will be deployed under the team. We can do anything with this project. I can let you into my project. I have a contact with me in my profile. Go to the project, you will see all my settings for yourself. We will discuss all the questions.

We can conduct a role-playing game with your team on my project. Let's see how it works. You will make an adaptation for yourself.

How do you like it?

You Welcome!

[vildana_ermaya]

@Konstantin Nazarov 

I saw your above screenshot and how you have it set up is interesting. We currently don't have "test" cards since we don't have test engineers on our team. Our Devs do their own testing outside of Jira. I could see the use of incorporating a checklist of sorts into cards which would include an item for testing. 

[vildana_ermaya]

Hi @Konstantin Nazarov

I see your point where if you add a label to a card it increases the size of the card and makes the entire sprint board appear longer. 

In terms of visibility, are you saying that currently you cannot hide the labels from showing on a card when viewing the entire sprint board?

[Konstantin Nazarov]

I removed duplicate content from the comment. There was a server crash. comments have not been published

There was a server error, and no my comments were published. Now all of them are visible. I ask the moderator to kill duplicates of my comments, and seved the one with the screenshot. I apologize to the community for the duplicates. They were not my fault. It was just that the comment could not be published, and after a while all the comments appeared in the discourse.

(Some kind of server crash and I can't post to @Liam Green1 's thread loading a screenshot results in an error)

Another attempt at add Comment

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Can't post image, Can't post link to image, Can't post link to post. Successfully posted screenshot in thread:

Can't add Start/Due Date to issue detail view

in my comment.

[Konstantin Nazarov]

I removed duplicate content from the comment. There was a server crash. comments have not been published

[Konstantin Nazarov]

Hi @vildana_ermaya 

I'm just on another thread, in response to another question, I posted this screen 

(the Date field is superfluous here, the question was about the fact that this field is not displayed, I checked). This is an example of my setup from one of the issue (Testing issue). From practice there is a limited set of communication units, and their peculiarity is that they can be multiple. A Scrum feature, for example, that the entire team needs to know the big picture of Scrum's transparency values. I was able to implement this in Jira on checkboxes, when the answer is predetermined, and the person only indicates himself under the answer. Anything that is not among the predefined answers does not need to be automated.

[Konstantin Nazarov]

I removed duplicate content from the comment. There was a server crash. comments have not been published (02)

[vildana_ermaya]

Hi @Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ ,

Thank you for your feedback! Moving away from using labels for everything is our next step!