How to Manage Linked Work in Jira: Best Practices and Advanced Options

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How to Manage Linked Work in Jira: Best Practices and Advanced Options

Linking work items in Jira is a powerful way to show relationships between tasks. Whether you’re tracking dependencies, blocking issues, or simply connecting related work, links help teams understand context and collaboration across projects.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• How to link work items in Jira natively

• Common challenges with issue links

• Best practices for managing linked work

• Advanced options when you need more flexibility

Linking work items in Jira

Jira comes with built-in link types like “blocks,” “is blocked by,” “relates to,” and more. You can:

1. Open a work item .

2. Scroll to the Linked issues section .

3. Choose a link type and select the target work item.

This makes it easy to trace dependencies, but at scale things can get messy.

Common pitfalls with issue links

Teams often run into challenges such as:

• Too many link types → making it unclear which ones apply to which projects.

• Inconsistent usage → teams using different link types for the same purpose.

• Manual effort → updating or deleting links one by one across multiple work items.

• Limited visibility → hard to distinguish important links at a glance.

These challenges can slow down reporting and increase confusion instead of improving clarity .

Best practices for linked work in Jira

To keep linked work useful and efficient:

• ✅ Define a standard set of link types your team should use.

• ✅ Limit link types to those that add real value (avoid “everything everywhere”).

• ✅ Train your team on when to use “blocks” vs “relates to” vs other types.

• ✅ Regularly review linked work to clean up outdated or incorrect links.

Advanced options: managing links at scale

If you’ve been using Jira for a while, you may already have hundreds or thousands of linked work items. Managing them one-by-one isn’t practical.

This is where Marketplace apps can help. For example, Advanced Link Manager for Jira (an app from Atlassway) adds extra flexibility, such as :

• Defining which link types are allowed per project

• Instantly detecting and warning about unauthorized or incorrect link types (even existing ones)

• Reordering and structuring linked work for better readability

• Bulk managing and cleaning linked work items

• Matrix view to monitor link health

• Graph view to visualize dependencies between linked work items

• Enhanced and structured display of linked work inside the issue vi

These features save time and reduce errors, especially in large projects where links play a key role in project tracking .

Final thoughts

Linked work in Jira is an essential feature for tracking dependencies and relationships, but it works best when teams keep things simple and consistent. With a few best practices  and the right tools for bulk management you can make linked work both more useful and easier to maintain.

👉 How does your team use linked work in Jira? Do you rely on links heavily, or only for specific cases? Share your approach with the community we’d love to hear it!

[Karim Belhadj]

We recently updated this article to reflect what we see more and more in real Jira projects today: link sprawl, inconsistent link types, and the difficulty of managing linked work at scale.

One thing that surprised many teams is how much legacy data is already problematic. After installing Advancex Link Manager, existing Jira issue links that use unauthorized or incorrect link types are instantly highlighted even historical ones which makes it much easier to identify and clean up problem areas.

Curious to hear: how do you currently handle old or inconsistent Jira issue links in your projects?