What can I do with artifact types?

Project owners configure projects to meet the needs of their members.

For example, as a project owner, you can add artifact types such as Defects, Requests for Enhancements, and Requirements to a project to enable project members to do their work. You can modify artifact types to suit particular project requirements. The basic tasks for a project owner are to:

• Manage artifact types
• Manage attributes that are associated with the artifact types used in a project
• Activate duplication checking

A domain administrator creates global artifact types that project owners can add to a project. As a project owner, you can create project-specific modifications to these artifact types, add global artifact types to a project, and delete artifact types from a project.

The following summarizes the changes that you can make to an artifact type:

• Name and Description - Project Tracker can maintain separate instances of an artifact even if the local instance has a different name from the global instance (the artifact type defined by the administrator).
• Attribute groups - These are sets of non-people-related attributes, such as Summary, Description, and so on, collected under a single heading.
• User attributes - User attributes are used to create a relationship between a user and an artifact, for example to establish the artifact owner. User attributes can determine who is notified when modifications are made to instances of this artifact type. For example, if a project member edits a Defect, the person assigned to the CC attribute receives email notification.
• Dependency rules - These are rules that determine relationships between attributes. See What is a dependent attribute? for details.

Every artifact type consists of a set of attributes. A domain administrator creates global attributes and associates them with artifact types. As a project owner, you can add and remove attributes from an artifact type at the project level. You can also edit characteristics of these attributes. For example, you can determine if your users are required to enter a Reason for Change when they edit the value of a particular attribute type. You can also change groupings of attributes at the project level.

When creating groups of attributes, you can mark one of the attributes as the identifier. The artifact number and the identifier value become the Subject line of email messages that are sent when an artifact instance is created, modified, or a comment is added. For example, selecting a Summary attribute as an identifier may produce the following email subject line, "Subject: Project artifact #SC34: Application set my house on fire." The identifier value also becomes the text link to the full artifact in query results pages. When users view an artifact instance, the page header also displays the artifact number and the identifier value.

Only the following types of attributes may be identifiers:

• Text, short
• Text, long
• Email address