Definable named relationships between items are what provide structure to your Integrity Lifecycle Manager configuration, establishing hierarchies and traceability. Items can have an unlimited number of relationships, but standard relationships are defined in the solution templates. For example, a test case relates “upstream” to an originating requirement. Your organization can configure relationships to reflect its own unique needs (and add new relationships as required). Relationships can be used to group items for management and impact analysis as well as driving automated metrics and suspect tracing.

Linking an item to another item creates two relationships: forward and backward. Forward relationships are relationships where the related item is a child of the original item. Backward relationships are relationships where the related item is a parent of the original item. For example, if you link a master feature to a secondary feature, it creates a forward relationship from the master feature to the secondary feature and a backward relationship from the secondary feature to the master feature. You can create a relationship from either the child or the parent, and the corresponding field in the related item is updated automatically. Every relationship therefore consists of a pair of relationship fields: one for the forward relationship and one for the backward relationship.