Improve metadata display/use on issues list for faceted filtering, e.g. label frequency

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Problem to solve

When viewing a long list of issues, it is difficult to ascertain the nature and diversity of their attributes as a whole. What are the most common labels and assignees? What proportion have no labels, or have a milestone? It is hard to get to know or to clean up a set of issues without having this.

Target audience

All GitLab users, but especially those who need to manage and organize issues, and those onboarding onto a project.

Further details

Proposal

When viewing the issues list, offer a 'faceted search' style display of the most common attributes among the issues: e.g. authors, assignees, labels, milestones. (Akin to common shopping-site searches; in short, summarize the metadata of what was found.)

Also allow users to quickly filter the view by including or excluding these common attributes simply by selecting or deselecting them. (In short, make that summarized metadata interactive.)

For example, currently, we can choose to further filter by any label, but there is no indication of the number of issues matching those labels. Which ones are common among the other criteria I've already filtered for? Which are rare?

One option is to update the Label: dropdown to allow the user to toggle between an alphabetical sort (the current sort) and a sort by # matching issues. In either case, each label name could have a number of issues next to it.

label_frequency

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Links / references

Edited Jun 27, 2025 by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖
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