Search issues by label on an agile board

[fcorreia]

On the backlog view, there's a search box to the left of the quick filters (see screenshot below). How do I use this search box to find issues by label?

Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 11.37.33.png

I've tried entering these queries, but no issues were found in any of the cases, even though the first two work when searching through the issues search (i.e., the "Issues" top menu):

• labels=<label_name>
• labels in (<label_name>)
• <label_name>
• label=<label_name>

[piyushchitkara]

You can create board filters in the board settings > Quick Filters and give JQL for labels = <Your label> 

That worked for me

[Jeroen Vancraen]

Is there no way to create like a dropdown to search on any label? Or to fill in some text and mark something like 'search on label'

[Nicolas Bourdages]

That search goes through summaries by keyword. It's not a JQL query bar, so you can't specify a field.

Quick Filters and Swimlanes (in the active sprints view) support JQL, so there are your only options for finding labels in an Agile board.

[fcorreia]

That's a shame :-/ Note that it would be enough to just enter the label text in the search field. I wouldn't need necessarily to search by the label field.

Quick filters unfortunately can only be created by administrators. I can't create a quick filter for my use only.

[Nicolas Bourdages]

What you can do however is create your own filters and use them in gadgets on your dashboard.

Your filter could be something like "sprint in openSprints() and label = your_label"

[fcorreia]

Unfortunately that won't help me with all the visual noise that I'm getting in the agile board. Thanks anyway!

[Nicolas Bourdages]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're trying to:

1. Filter out all issues that do not concern you
2. Do it in a way that's scalable (that's why you don't want 20 quick filters for 20 users)

Maybe you could use a user picker custom field instead of a label. The issues that matter to you would have your name in it. Then you could have your board admin create a single quick filter that goes something like "custom_field = currentUser()"

That way, everybody could potentially use that solution.

[fcorreia]

I think your suggestion could work if we would know up-front which stories will matter to us, but assigning users to stories up-front is not something that we want to do.

Saying it another way, we don't want the extra work of "marking" in the stories that would interesting to us. Nonetheless, if we did want to do that, we would need to find them first anyway, so a way to filter/query the stories by label in the agile board would still be needed.

To give you a little more context: Our system is composed by several software modules. We have labels for each of these modules, and then also "backend" and "frontend" labels depending if it's a module that provides backend services or frontend services. 

During a sprint, our developers pick which user stories they will work on, and it would be useful to be able to query/filter stories that may be more within our domains of expertise and/or are related to the stories that we have been working on lately and/or simply fit our mood at the time.

[fcorreia]

This feature would solve it, as it would allow me to create a filter by label: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/GHS-4735

[Nicolas Bourdages]

Yeah, well it doesn't look like they're gonna implement that feature anytime soon.

I'm personally not a fan of labels. Components seem to be better suited for software modules, and are project-specific. But okay, that's besides the issue.

I still believe quick filters a good bet. If you have too many different modules to make one quick filter per module, can you make "groups" of similar modules? For instance, if I'm a database admin, I would click on the filter that regroups the "database", "db-scripts" and other related labels?

If not, are you using Epics? I know many teams who don't really use Epics in their development process and use them instead to regroup issues by a common trait, like a feature group. Perhaps you could use Epics instead of labels for your issues and use the epic panel to filter them.

These are just ideas. I'm sure there's something to be done with this, but it will require some change on the part of users.

[Azaliya Elmirou]

Labels = Your label name

This is what worked for me.