How to Link one Defect to Multiple User Stories

[Neelkanth Narute]

Hi Team,

I would like know about how to link one defect to multiple stories. 

Regards,
Neel

[Karen Gwynn]

I don't think you can from the Defect field. When I have this, I do the laborious manual linking either in the story Details or the Discussion. Hand type the defect ID, copy a link, paste it and add the defect name. Like I said, laborious, but it gets the job done. Its also how I link together related stories when their relationship isn't parent/child or a dependency. There are probably methodology reasons for not doing this, but reality is different from theory.

[Michael Stieber]

Karen is correct. There is a 1:1 relationship between a Story and a given Defect. The Defect can be moved from one Story to another, but it can only have one Story relationship at at a time.

Best regards,

Mike Stieber

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[Rally Software]
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[David Spalding]

Not to question or discourage your ask, but reading your request made me think how to do this. 

If the purpose of the "multiple stories" linked to one defect due to effort (multiple-sprints of work), then I would set them up as predecessors and successors. A "daisy chain" as it were. Each would contain the link to the defect. 

An option in Rally that some use is a "parent story" with child stories to accomplish the work. IF the work required to resolve the defect is in multiple teams, I'd recommend a Feature to encapsulate and track the work on multiple stories doled out to separate teams (Projects).

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SM, Application Support
Cigna
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[Nev Percy]

Hi Neel, everyone.

I have mostly internalised the Rally position that a Defect can only ever be the child of one User Story.
I won't say we never want them to be linked to more, but I think those times are where we're trying to make the User Story item do something beyond what it's intended for in its simplest form.  And we do that quite a lot, one way or another!

Another horrible way to tie everything together might be to artificially make multiple copies of the Defect and link them all together as Duplicates.
But I would probably still prefer either Karen's or David's approaches.

--Nev.