Codebeamer organizes tracker items by placing each item in exactly one tracker, which then acts as the container of that item. However, the items do not need to exist in complete isolation, they can have relations to other items or projects in other trackers.

Relations are critical for managing, auditing, and tracing back changes. For example, you can trace back which tasks were triggered by which requirements. Then when you also associate your code changes with these tasks, you can take traceability to the next level: you can easily identify which requirements resulted in which source code changes. For more information, see Tracing Source Code Changes to Requirements, Task and Bugs.

There are two types of relations between tracker items:

References are relations that are bound to reference fields of tracker items. For more information, see Creating and Customizing Trackers.

Reference fields are similar to Foreign Keys in Relational Databases, and have the following properties:

The name of a reference field is a synonym for the relation between the referring item and reference field values, or in other words, the function or role, that the referring item plays for the reference field values or vice versa. For example:

You can configure the Cardinality of references as follows:

You can also define Constraints between the reference fields of the same tracker. For example:

See Dynamic pick-list fields for more information about dynamic or relation-based dependencies between reference fields.