Broken By Defect and Breaks Workitem

Broken By Defects can be used to link a story to a defect that was found during testing. Like your team is working on a story and they do some testing and find a serious issue, they could enter a defect and link it to the Story using Broken By Defects. That way you have that dependency that let's your team know they have to fix this before they can release that story.

Breaks Workitem goes in reverse of that. So for the defect entered when the issue was found testing that Story, you would enter that Story's info in the defect under Breaks Workitem to complete the dependency connection. So anyone looking at the defect knows it breaks an active story.

Also, you CAN have a defect that BREAKS a defect, so Broken by Defect is also available on defects. Breaks Workitem is NOT available on Stories though.

For each attribute, though, you can enter multiple values. So a defect can break many stories, and a story can be broken by many defects.

This is just another way to report on dependencies. In Custom Reporting you can run a report Blocked Workitem Report in the Quick Reports section, or you can create Broken by Defect reports or Breaks Workitem reports.