Jira issues may have a "Private Lable" for better issue management

[Eric]

Hi all, my name is Eric, I'm a software engineer at a IT company, and we use JIRA to track our R&D and customer issues.

But with issues become more and more, I find it's difficult to manage the issues with current mechanism:
  As you can see, we usually use "Label" to classify the issues and show some information on common concern, so the team always need to have unified principle and guideline to label the issues.
  But mostly these labels doesn't tell how I see this issue or how I'm relevant to it, so those public labels doesn't help much pick out the issues we are interested in or get involved when we want to check what we need to next. And the bigger scope the issue is in, the less the labels helps to filter.
  Maybe you will say, you could "watch" the issues you are interested in and be the "assignee" of issues you are involved.
  But, I can watch issues for different reasons but the watching action can't tell; and a issue may get more than one involved, but the assignee can only be one.
  So, I would really like a better and more convenient method of managing the issues relevant to me when the "label" can't be easily change at my will.

Nowadays, I come up a suggestion of dealing with this:
 I think we could add a new attribute to issues, let's call it "Private Label".
The "Private Label" is like "Label", you can use it to show some tag or information on this issue,e.g. "blocking-my-xx-progress", "big-one-for-me", "my-backlog", but it's private.
Everyone can edit the "Private Label" on the same issue, but they can only see their own version. And the "Private Label" they used, won't be shown as others' label alternatives.
With "Private Label", we could easily label how this issue is relevant to us without disturbing others and make the management of issues more convenient, thus help us to do our job!

So, how do you like this suggestion, please don't hesitate if you have any better idea!
Thanks for you attention, best wishes!

[Jack Brickey]

So my first opinion comment is that Labels is a poor solution for anything that needs to be reliable. I would opt for either using Components or creating a new field of type selection with a predefined list of values. Yes Watching is the best option to stay abreast of issues you are interested in. However, you can also consider filter subscriptions and construct a filter that returns issue of interest.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm also reticent about private labels, I can rapidly see a case of "well it's in my report" causing collaboration and sharing to break down.

[Eric]

Thanks for you comments!

Maybe I talked too much about label to make you think that we do everything only with label, my bad.

Here I suggested the Private Label compared with label is just like things always have subjective and objective attributes, yes we need the objective information to see what it is, but we also need the subjective information to indicate how things are relevant to us.

As you said, if we watched a issue, we could keep updated, but if we watched a lot issues, we will lose focus, and it would be hard to find the one we are looking for, since it's can't be filtered or organized as we wanted. This is because the issue doesn't know how we see it, even though we know in our mind.

"Private Label" is just a concept I'm trying to express, that we could do some private mark, to make issue management more powerful and friendly. 

I think JIRA is trying to make issue management easily and conveniently, especialy when there are messive ones, so, I just proposal a idea that may do a little help to achieve this.

It would be great to have better ideas, hope Jira could be better and better.

[Frank Van Damme]

Eric, I'm with you.  

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think the subjective and objective thing is a very good way to talk about this.

The thing for me though is that when you're trying to work with other people, "subjective" is a problem, and "objective" is a solution.

If I see something subjectively, there's a frame within which I see it.  It's my view, I could be missing things, or seeing some stuff differently to the people I'm trying to work with. 

If I know I'm getting an objective view, I know I'm seeing the same things in the way other people are seeing them.  How it is interpreted individually is another thing, but at least we are all working from the same incoming data.

"private labels" makes your "source of truth" subjective and hence non-collaborative.  There's no harm in doing it to fit the way you work, but the best way to do it is to keep it completely to yourself, not ask the data you're looking at to do it.  Don't label the source data without sharing.  If you need to label it for yourself, well, that's what browser bookmarks do.

Think of it this way:
"It's not in our shared reports because most of us can't see a label you've hidden"
vs
"It's not in our shared reports because we can't see your browser bookmarks"

[Sage Arbor]

Is there a way to do a test label , so you are not clogging up labels that others see (as you for example tag and clean up a backlog , or experiment in a test Jira instance)?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's better to experiment in a test instance.

Although with labels, if you're sparing with the tests, they're easy to find and remove after your testing!