In
Rational Team Concert™,
a work item is a generalized notion of a development task. Typical
types of work items are defects, enhancements, and tasks. Work items
are used as key indicators of project quality and project health along
with build status and other indicators. Work items help the team track
and coordinate their work.
As in a bug tracking system, work items
are used for the following purposes:
- To identify and describe activities
- a bug report
- a feature improvement
- a feature extension
- a simple task like cleaning the code, checking the dependencies
- a customer requirement
- To track a work item's discussion history
- To attach documents and to link it to other artifacts as part
of the discussion
You can also use work items to perform the following
tasks:
- Transfer tasks between the team members
- Link work items with code changes so that you can navigate from
code to work item or vice versa
- Plan tasks within a development milestone or iteration
- Inform the rest of the team what each user is working on
- Justify your code changes, providing reasons why you are changing
code
- List the content of a new delivery, not just the code changes
- Provide metrics pertaining to the health of the project