Add Linked Tasks: two-way relationships without explicitly blocking/waiting on other tasks

[Stephen_Cruz]

This request is in many ways an expansion of the Reference custom field.

Background

• The Reference custom field allows users to link to related tasks, projects, portfolios and/or goals, which is often used to point to relevant or supporting information.
• These relationships are not exactly dependencies, in that they don’t block/aren’t blocked by the references. Instead, they often inform/are informed by the references.
• Currently, adding a reference to a task (Task A) is one-way—the task being linked (Task B) does not display this relationship on its end.
  • For one, Task B’s home project might not have the same custom field set up.
  • Task B also does not hint at this connection being made in its activity/comment log.
• The closest available solution is to manually create a breadcrumb both ways—mention the two tasks in their respective descriptions or in a comment.
  • While this successfully creates a two-way connection, that link is embedded with a task’s activity log, which is co-populated by lots of other activity (e.g. assignee changes, due date adjustments, etc.)
• Alternatively, while using Dependencies provides an easy look at connecting tasks, related tasks might not necessarily be intended to block or wait on each other, especially if the relationship is to a reference, if you will, and not a task (e.g. an entry in a project folder meant to act as a reference folder, instead of a to-do list.)
• Our team thinks it would be ideal to take the intuitiveness of adding links via Reference field and combine it with the at-a-glance visibility that Dependencies provides, by way of a Linked Tasks feature (the closest comparison I can provide here is the way ClickUp implements it, where Linked Tasks are managed similarly to Dependencies, without triggering blocking/blocked by warnings.)

Ideas

• With the Reference custom field, a way to make the relationship two-way is ideal—for linked tasks that are in projects that don’t have the same custom field yet, an option to immediately add this to the project would help, though this may require a user to have permission to both tasks and/or projects.
• If we are to make this a built-in feature a la Dependencies, the immediate change is to remove the logic that triggers warnings for when a task is blocked/is blocking the linked task. A new section in the detailed task view that compiles all relationships would then be helpful, removing the need to dig through other comments/activity to find the relevant relationship.