Jira issue tracking meets tagging

I just had a brainwave. For a little while I’ve been wondering about how ineffectual setting the Component seems to be in Jira. Many end users don’t know what component the issue affects, initial assessment is often wrong, and most of the time it just feels like you are entering data for data’s sake:

Add to that the fact that Jira does not support per-component versioning (AKA truly nested projects) and Component seems pretty redundant; it can only used in searches or in the Open Issues tab to break down by component.

With the popularity of tagging in applications like Flickr, iPhoto, delicious etc I wondered if this might work better for grouping issues.

Also I’ve recently been working with a client for whom I have setup all the initial tasks we have but I need them to prioritise them for me so that I can tackle the most important ones first in a series of incremental code builds. Changing the issue priority is a coarse way of doing this – I want to schedule these into different release versions in the roadmap, and have sensible priorities on them within each version. Also, if I re-edit the priority later I lose the information that the client provided about the importance of this issue to them.
I realised that tagging would help here. Tags like “must have”, “very desirable” and “wish list” are concepts that people can relate to, and allow me to preserve issue priority information (which applies per release rather than globally).

I thought of adding a custom field as Jira has great support for these, and includes them in searches etc. However it might be a bit too loose – my clients may not know what tags to type in, spell them wrong etc and we end up with a mess.

Then I realised. Component field settings ARE tagging but with the wrong name. I’m going to set up “components” (in Jira parlance) for “Must have”, “Very desirable”, “Wishlist” as well as other non-priority terms like “Web”, “Search”, “Content”, “Browser compatibility”. These are not strictly components at all but if you look beyond the name you can get exactly what you want – and even better, the Open Issues tab will now show me how many “Must have” issues there are etc – and provide links to view lists of them so that I can review them, bulk change, and assign them to versions in my roadmap.

We can’t rename the Component/s field to “Tags” in Jira – maybe they will do it for us in future… but for now in Jira setup (Issue Fields) we can at least change the description to explain the tags concept to the end users.