Various kinds of data repositories may manage their content in multiple forms, such as records. A record may generally be described as, e.g., a collection of individual data fields, which may be of different types. For example, the records may represent bug reports and may include information about how to reproduce the bug, what version of the product in which the bug was found, how serious the bug is, etc. A record of this type may include fields that identify a feature or component that has the bug, a developer who may work on fixing the bug, what future release of the product may get the fix, etc.
Records may also have relationships to other records. For instance, records of one type could have relationships with other records of the same type. For example, a bug report may have a list of related bug reports. Relationships may also include records of different types. For example, a bug report may be planned to be fixed in a certain “iteration”, where the iteration itself may be a type of record. In the example, custom workflows may be defined to match a customer's desired business practices. For instance, the system may require that a record have certain fields set before it may be saved or moved to a new state. The same changes may be made to more than one record, and with a large number of records being changed, there is an increased likelihood that something may go wrong that may then affect large numbers of records.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds