Link validity

You can show link validity information to identify whether the contents of artifacts in a linked relationship satisfy the meaning of the link. Showing link validity can help you keep linked data consistent as you make changes and as the changes affect other artifacts.

By default, most attributes affect the link validity status. Project administrators can choose to edit the custom attributes to specify whether the value of the attribute affects link validity status. See Creating attributes for requirement artifacts.

When you enable this option, a validity status icon is shown next to each link in the project area. In views and artifact grids that show links to artifacts, you can also show the validity summary by adding it as a column in the view. The validity summary is an aggregation of the link validity statuses to upstream artifacts. You can clear this option to reduce the clutter on the page where links are shown. For example, it might not be important to consider link validity status at the beginning of a release or milestone. For project areas that aren't enabled for configurations, link validity information is available only for links to IBM® Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next artifacts.

You can also include the link validity settings as a part of project or component template when you create a template in the DOORS Next application. If you include the link validity settings in the template, the settings from the original project area are applied when the template is used for creating projects or components.