Linking test cases to development work items

If your team has set up an integration with Rational® Team Concert® version 2.x or the Engineering Workflow Management application, you can link your test cases to development work items. As such, you can set up a mapping between a feature that a developer is working on and your test case.

Before you begin

Before you can link a test case to a work item, these requirements must be met:

Integration must be configured with Rational Team Concert version 2.x or the CCM application.
There must be work items in an Engineering Workflow Management or CCM project area to be linked to.

About this task

The types of work items that are available depend on the process that the development team is using. Not all work item types are available in all processes. Typical work item types include Plan Items, Defects, Enhancements, Tasks, Stories, and so on. For more information about work items, see the section on Managing change and releases.

Limitations: If you do not enable configuration management, when you create a link to external artifacts in the Engineering Lifecycle Management application, a link is automatically created back to the source artifact, which is called a back link. However, the synchronization between bidirectional links and the traceability between source and target artifacts might be unavailable depending on certain transactional operations in the source or target application.

Learn more about bi-directional links:

When you can navigate from the target of a link back to the source of the link, this is known as bidirectional linking.

If the configuration management is enabled in the Quality Management project, the links are stored in the source artifact repository and back-links are discovered by the target artifact server making queries on the source artifact servers or LDX.

If configuration management is not enabled, the source and target applications store their links in separate databases, and the source application does not have access to the database in the target application. Certain transactional operations, such as when artifacts are copied or deleted, can occur on the source application server. In these cases, corresponding back links in artifacts in the target application are not automatically added or removed. Also, instances occur where back links are intentionally removed from the target application without removing the corresponding link from the source application. As a result, if bidirectional links are not in a state of synchronization, traceability between the source and target artifacts can appear different based on your starting viewpoint.

To add or remove target artifact links to or from the source artifact, you do not need permission to save the target artifacts.

Procedure

To link a test case to a work item:

Open a test case or create one.
If there is no Development Items section in your current test case, you can add one:
1. In the test case, click Manage Sections.
2. In the Manage Sections window, click Show all Sections.
3. Select Development Items, and then click the arrow.
4. Click the up or down arrow to move the Development Items section to the appropriate location in the test case.
5. Click OK.
In the table of contents, click Development Items to open the Development Items section.
Click the Add development items icon ().
Select the work item to link to the test case.
1. In the Type field, select the work item type to search for; then select Show All to show all work item types.
2. Type the work item ID or words that the text of the work item contains.
3. Select the work item that you want from the list.
4. Click OK to add the work item to the test case.
5. Click Save to save the test case.

Results

After the work item is added to the test case, you can hover over the work item ID to view the status of the work item. When the developer updates the status in the work item, the changes will be reflected in the work item ID in the test case.

Later, you can open the test case from the link in the work item.