What's the purpose of linking issues if link relationship is not enforced?

Question

Hi,
Issue links are important for stating the relationship between two issues (if any). However, I am struggling to find the usefulness of some of these links such as 'blocks' if they are not enforced to block the other issue.

For e.g. If an issue A is blocked by issue B, then unless B is completed or at least some work has been done on B, i shouldn't be able to proceed with A, let alone close the issue A, right?

So in such scenarios what's the purpose of issue linking? Is just just for simply showing that some issue is being blocked but it doesn't have any impact whatsoever? Shouldn't it confer for some action?
Meaning both issues could be just treated as normal issues without considering any special link between them.

Could anyone help me with this?
Many thanks,
Tayyab

MoroSystems Support · Answer

Well, if you were to implement some kind of constraint functionality how would you design it? Does blocks mean you cannot start on something until something else is finished? Yes, in some scenarios it makes sense.

However I can even more relate to the scenarios where blocks means the blocked task cannot be completed (in contrary to started) before the other is done.  And you see that even when we are just scratching the surface of the issue, we have two ways how it would make sense for us.

Tayyab Bashir · Answer

But putting meta-information is just not good enough when it comes to implementation of actual functionality.

For e.g. If I am planning for a sprint, and I have story in backlog which is being blocked by some other story or issue in the backlog. 
So when I try to add the story which is being blocked in the sprint, it should at least trigger some dialog that this issue/story is being blocked by some other issue. 
Doesn't it make sense to do so?

I mean how can one technically start and resolve something which was being blocked by some other issue. 
Then either the relationship was bogus or its implementation is flawed.

MoroSystems Support · Answer

Hello Tayyab,

as I understand it, issue links are just meta-information about issues relationships and they intentionally are just that. The advantage of this is that Jira doesn't enforce some specific way of working with tasks and leaves that up to the company's needs.

If you want to perform or restrict some action, you can of course do that by post functions/conditions/etc. that can read if some issue is e.g. blocked.

That's my point of view and I think it is actually good that Jira is so free about it. It gives you easy way of setting data and gives you tools with which you can make use of it.

Regards,
Martin