This topic describes how to customize relationships between work items to improve project management efficiency.
Type relationships
In Apsara DevOps Projex, relationships between work item types are divided into three categories. These categories are used to establish relationships between work items.
Introduction to relationships
Parent-child relationship: A one-to-many directed relationship. A work item can have only one parent but multiple children. A child is considered a part of its parent. For example, you can break down a large requirement into several sub-requirements and deliver them as different modules.
Dependency relationship: A many-to-many directed relationship. A work item can depend on multiple items and can be a dependency for multiple items. A dependent work item can be completed only after the work items it depends on are completed. For example, a ticket depends on a product requirement. The ticket can only be closed after the product requirement is delivered.
Association relationship: A many-to-many undirected relationship. A work item can be associated with multiple work items. For example, a requirement can be associated with other requirements, bugs, documents, and test cases.
In Apsara DevOps Projex, you can view all related items in the panoramic graph. You can access this graph from the work item details page.
Automatic interactions between relationships
In Projex, you can use automation rules to link the statuses and fields of related items. For more information, see the following documents:
Parent-child relationship: See Automatic interactions for parent-child relationships.
Dependency relationship: See Automatic interactions for dependency relationships.
Association relationship: See Automatic interactions for association relationships.
Custom relationship settings
To allow users to configure work item relationships more flexibly based on their scenarios, Apsara DevOps Projex provides custom relationship settings. Organization administrators can define relationship types based on their organization's collaboration scenarios. For example, when you create a new relationship, you can set the parent type to Bug and the child type to Requirement.
Edit and create relationships: You can edit existing relationships or create new ones. When you edit or create a relationship, Projex checks for duplicates to ensure that the relationship between two types is unique.
Enable and disable relationships: You can enable or disable relationships. Disabling a relationship does not affect existing work item relationship records. However, you cannot create new relationship records of that type. For example, if you disable the association relationship between requirements and bugs, existing associations are retained, but you cannot create new ones.
Delete relationships: When you delete a relationship type, Projex checks if any work item relationship records of that type exist. If such records exist, a notification is displayed. If you confirm the deletion, the corresponding relationship records are also deleted. System-initialized relationships cannot be deleted.