Relationships

Atlas uses Relationships to help you understand how different items are connected. Changing an object may have implications on other elements of the Project. For example, changing a Requirement that has already been pushed as a Story in your Agile planning tool might change the scope or complexity of the Story. Relationships are supported to allow you to see the connection between Requirements and other related assets. Linking related objects together helps to ensure that changes are implemented correctly at all levels.

Atlas provides the following Relationships:

Requirements with Stories, Whiteboards, Concepts, Atlas Hub items, and Requirements in different projects.
Concepts with Stories, Atlas Hub items and Concepts in different Whiteboards.
Whiteboards and Stories.

You can create relationships manually in Atlas through the Relationships tab in the Requirement editor. Atlas Hub items are located in the Other tab. Atlas Hub items include Agile planning, testing, defect tracking and Microsoft Office tools.

Atlas also creates some Relationships automatically for you. Whenever you push Requirements to the Backlog in your Agile planning tool, Atlas creates a Relationship between the Requirement and the Story it creates on the Backlog. You can also relate a Requirement to a Story that already exists. As well as helping you understand the Relationship between the Requirement and the Story, Atlas also uses the Relationship to track the progress of the Story.

The following lists the types of relationships used within the Atlas Planning and Tracking Suite:

User Managed/Created: Basic, Copy, Dependent, Requirement Stream, and Requirement Synchronization.
Application Managed/Created: Carry Over, Defect Stream, Execution (relationship between a Story and a Sprint, for example) , Parent-Child, and Requirement Stream.

Relationship Status

Each relationship type may have various statuses. When a change is made to an item with a Relationship, the relationship status changes to Suspect. You can view the change and update the status to bring it up-to-date, or you can Defer the update. If you defer, the status of the Relationship changes to Defer.

Important: For all Relationships, except for synchronizations, changing the status does not change the items. The status acts as a label to help you find what you've reviewed and what you need to review. For example, updating the status changes the status to up-to-date but does not make any changes to the target item details.

Watch how to do it: Create a Relationship.