Introduced in Enabling Lifecycle Collaboration with OSLC for servers that are friended, Project Associations are a link between two projects that enable specific link types between the artifacts of those two projects.

Depending on the authoring tool, those Project Associations and link types can vary.

OSLC Connect for Jira and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

In IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) and OSLC Connect for Jira, Project Associations are meant to group the link types defined by the OSLC specifications that serve a similar business case. In that context, Project Associations are often symmetrical to enable creating links from either application.

Available Project Associations are the following.

Legend: Application’s OSLC domains are the below.

Requirements Management

IBM DOORSNext

Architecture Management

IBM EWM

Quality Management

IBM ETM

Change Management

Atlassian Jira and IBM EWM

Association (owner)

Back-association

Description

Provides - Defects

Uses - Defects

Enables linking change artifacts to test to track to materialize a test development, a blocking defect or an affecting change request

Provides - Quality Management Tasks

Uses - Quality Management Tasks

Enables a less semantically strict relation that materializes that a change artefact and a test artefact are related to each other

Uses - Requirements

Provides - Requirements

Enables for a requirement to be validated by a test artefact

Uses - Architecture Elements

Provides - Architecture Elements

Enables architecture elements to be validated by a test artefact

Provides - Implementation Requests

Uses - Implementation Requests

Enables materializing that a requirement is either implemented or affected by a given change artefact

Provides - Requirements Change Requests

Uses - Requirements Change Requests

Enables tracking of a requirement by a change artefact

Provides - Related Change Requests

Provides - Related Change Requests

Enables for 2 change artifacts to affect or contribute to each other, as well as simply being related to one another

Provides - Change Requests

Uses - Change Requests

Enables materializing that an architecture artefact elaborates a change artefact

Uses - Requirements

Provides - Requirements

Enables precise linking expliciting that an architecture resource either derives, refines, satisfies or traces a requirement

Provides - Related Requirements

Provides - Related Requirements

Enables precise linking to materialize that a requirement either constrains, decomposes, specifies, satisfies or elaborates another requirement

Enabled link types aim to match those defined in the OSLC specifications.

When using OSLC Connect for Jira, links exist in Jira, so they will always be visible. That is also the case in IBM ELM, except when Global Configurations are used. In that case, one application will be the owner of the link, and the other one will need to discover it.

Read this article to learn about:

  • IBM’s link index (LDX) and OSLC’s query capability.

OSLC Connect for Confluence

In OSLC Connect for Confluence, Project Associations are a mapping to a given application for a given OSLC business domain exposed by that application.

Once your Project Associations is created, you can include an OSLC artifact on your Confluence page. And you don’t need to specify a link type for that, mostly because those do not have a specific semantic. And also because specifications don’t define any applicable link type!

This also means that when a link is created in OSLC Connect for Confluence, there are no back-links on the remote resource.

Siemens Polarion

In Siemens Polarion, the Project Associations is unique between two projects and enables each and every link type that was configured in the Polarion administration.

As a consequence, you need to make sure that the link types you are declaring in Polarion match the link types that are understandable by the remote application. That can sometimes be a challenge.

Check out these articles to learn how to map your Jira and Polarion link types: