How do you manage labels across products effectively

[Jan Van Bruaene]

For each project I can dump all the labels in use. Since labels are case sensitive, and to manage wild fire among labels (android, Android, AndroidPort, JellyBean, etc) a tiny bit, I am looking for a mechanism to dump all the labels in use across all projects into a spreadsheet. Any way to do this?

Related, how do you manage people coming up with all kind of label names?

Thanks, Jan

[Renjith Pillai · Accepted solution]

In fact the whole purpose of lables is to allow this flexiblity of users having the ability to define their own terms. It is mostly a culture and process by which people start reusing labels. Also JIRA suggests the existing labels and people can see it while typing it in.

If you want a more restricted environment, use a select list instead of a label.

[Renjith Pillai]

And also remember the administrative overhead in managing that select list !

Leave it to people to decide and whoever wants to filter it using labels should be talking to people, for example - "For getting the attention of HR, please use the label hr_attn, that's it"

If someone makes a mistake, don't worry about it, if that issue is important it will come up and they will realize and change it.

[codecentric AG]

Sometimes you want to have a little bit more control over the items to not run into a mess of label items. You can use the component field instead to have defined list of items if you don't like to take multi select lists.

There is also a plugin available "Label Manager for JIRA" which allows you to use as many special label field types with a defined item list. The items can be managed by the project admin.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/rs.codecentric.label-manager-project/server/overview 

[Natalie Hobson]

Labels only exist once they have been associated with an issue - so to get rid of a label, you have to remove that value from any issue that has it. So, if there is a label "FunFriday", search for all issues that have "FunFriday" as a label, and remove the label from those issues.

If you want to remove all labels, then run a query to get any issues with a label ("labels is not empty"), bulk change > edit, click on the box next to the Labels field (but don't type anything in the field, leave it emtpy). That overwrites the values of the Labels field, making it empty.

When you remove the value of a label from all associated issues, that also removes it from the recomendation in the dropdown when you are typing in a new label.

[Natalie Hobson]

Oh geez, sorry - just realized you said "into" a spreadsheet (thought you were just trying to get rid of them). Again, search for "labels is not empty", configure your columns so that the Labels field is displayed, then export to excel.

Unfortunately, there is no way to manage the way people use labels once you have them turned on, unless you do so through manual communication (no way to automate it or put restrictions on it through out-of-the-box install, although there might be plugins that do, or you might be able to write your own plugin/script).