5.5 Associating Child Activity Records with a Parent Activity Record

As project manager, you may assign activities for large tasks to developers. When the developers research their activities, they may determine that they need to perform several separate activities to complete one large activity.

For example, an "Add customer verification functionality" activity may require significant work in the product's GUI, the command-line interface, and a library. To more accurately track the progress of the activity, you can decompose it into three separate activities.

By using the parent/child controls in ClearQuest, you can accomplish this decomposition and tie the child activities back to the parent activity.

Using Parent/Child Controls

In ClearQuest, you use controls to display fields in record forms. A parent/child control, when used with a reference or reference list field, lets you link related records. By adding a parent/child control to the record form of a UCM-enabled record type, you can provide the developers on your team with the ability to decompose a parent activity into several child activities.

To have ClearQuest change the state of the parent activity to Complete when all child activities have been completed, you need to write a hook. See Administering Rational ClearQuest for an example of such a hook.