Using the Categories field in Software projects

[#1]

My team has been creating training for other associates and recently we onboarded a team that will be using Jira Work Management. One of the concepts we discussed was the difference between Categories, Components, and Labels in our organization.

The Categories field is generally only available in JWM projects and the options can only be edited by an admin using the List tab. Why is this the case?

We can manually add Categories to the screens used by our Jira Software projects, but then we have an empty drop-down because JSW projects don't have a List tab. There's no way to add any options.

Why does Atlassian silo features in this way? It confuses our users who use multiple project types and makes training and standardization more difficult.

Edit: I realize this should have been a discussion, not a question. Oops.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Brock Jolet

JWM is a relatively new addition to Jira, and comes with a number of features that are specific to JWM projects. I can imagine that some of these would become available in other parts of Jira over time - but that's really just my outside guess.

Just as food for thought: In my understanding, the categories field is basically just a single-value select field, with some smaller additional features like coloured values. If the categories field doesn't work outside of JWM, you could consider creating a custom field of type Select List (single choice), and use this custom field instead. This custom field will then be useable across all project types.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes