Fields

Trackers are the basic building blocks in which information about an artifact is stored.
Two trackers differ only in the composition of their fields and in the meaning attributed to each of them.

Updating fields is done in the "Manage Field Usage" section of the Tracker admin interface.

Each field consists of the following:

• A name, used to identify the field within the tracker;

• A label, which corresponds to the name displayed on the screen;

• A description, which makes it possible to specify the nature of the information to be provided;

• A rank, which determines the location of the field in the artifact structure;

• A "required" checkbox, which specifies whether entering this field is mandatory or optional.

Then, depending on the field, there may be defaults or a list of choices to configure.

Practical information

The colors you assign to the values will then be included in the charts if the field was used to construct one.

For the "status" field, for example, several categories can be added.
Editing the field allows you to add new values and then arrange them, either alphabetically or in a custom order by dragging the corresponding rows.

The field will then be directly modified and will be displayed as desired in the form for creating or modifying an artifact:

Computed values

Each task can be associated with a cost, for example a time cost, and it can be useful to calculate the total cost of resolving a user story.
In this case, this cost corresponds to the sum of the costs of the tasks linked to that story.

To bring this information up to the story level, you can use a computed field.
This field adds together the values of a numeric field (integer or float) with the same name in the linked artifacts. The type of link does not matter: all associated artifacts are included in the calculation.

Once both fields have been created, enter the initial effort for each task in the Tasks tracker.

The computed field in the User Stories tracker will then automatically sum the values of the tasks associated with them in the Tasks tracker.

For the computed field to work properly, artifacts must be linked using the forward label.

In this example, links are created from the artifact in the “User Stories” tracker to the artifact in the “Tasks” tracker by selecting the forward label of the link.

If you choose the inverse label when linking the two artifacts (for example, “is covered by” instead of “covers”, or “is linked from” instead of “is linked to”), the link is then created from the other artifact to your artifact: the value of the linked artifact will not be taken into account in the computed field calculation.

You can find the different link types and their associated labels in the Trackers administration interface, under the “Links between artifacts” section.

You can verify the direction of a link in the “Links” tab of the artifact form: links from your artifact (those taken into account in the calculation) are displayed in the “Links to artifact” section, while inverse links are displayed in the “Reverse artifact links” section.