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

[Tayyab Bashir]

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

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Tayyab,

Issues links in Jira are useful to help understand how Jira issues relate to each other.   But that is about the extent of their functionality at least within the native Jira code.   I can understand why you might have made this logical leap to believe that these links somehow block workflow steps in other issues, but in fact the issue links have no direct effect on the workflows these issues follow.

But you're not alone in the desire to adjust workflows to use these issue links existence as a workflow condition.  For example, there are 3rd party plugins to Jira like Scriptrunner that could be used to create a workflow condition that would in turn be able to block a specific transition from happening should the issue have an issue link of a specific link type.   There are lots of other posts here on community where other users have solved that particular desired use case, such as:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Prevent-transitions-depending-on-the-status-of-linked-issues/qaq-p/153643
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Script-for-hiding-the-transition-of-issue-on-the-basis-of-the/qaq-p/387831
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Transition-issue-when-all-linked-issues-are-resolved/qaq-p/372658

So natively Jira is just using issue links to help users understand how an issue relates to other issues in Jira.   If you want these issue links to have additional meaning in regards to the way issues move through workflows, it seems clear to me that there are 3rd party plugins for Jira that can help with that.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Andy