Work Item Link Roles

Hand in hand with thinking about custom Work Item types, you need to think about what relationships can exist between items of your custom types. The standard types provided for software development have relationships like depends on, relates to, implements, verifies, and so forth. These relationships are defined in link roles and can be customized to define whatever relationships you need between your types of Work Items. Then in production, links with one or more link roles can be created between Work Items of your types, thereby creating exactly the kind of traceability you need. Link roles are defined in another enumeration configuration file: workitem-link-role-enum.xml (Administration Work Items Enumerations). For more information see Configure Enumerations.

Link Role Rules

Let's assume you defined several custom Work Item types and the link roles that cover all the relationships that can exist between these types. Some of those relationships should actually exist only between certain types, and never between other types. For example, you have a link role "fixes" for a relationship that can exist between Work Item types "Repair" and "Breakdown", but should never exist between Work Item types "Breakdown" and "Sales Call". That's where Link Role Rules come into play. For each link role you define, you can also define one or more rules that control between which Work Item types users can create links with that link role. You can configure the rules on the same page where you define the link roles.

For more information, see Link Roles and Rules.