「Relates to」Issue関連付けがパブリックプレビューに、マルチセレクトフィールドが一般提供開始“Relates to” issue relationship in public preview and multi-select fields is generally available

GitHub has introduced a new "Relates to" issue relationship in public preview and moved multi-select custom fields to general availability, two updates aimed at helping teams connect related work and capture richer metadata across issues and projects. For engineering and product groups that run planning inside GitHub rather than a separate tracker, the changes reduce the need to record dependencies and categories in external tools or free-form text.

The "Relates to" relationship lets users draw an explicit link between two issues that are connected but do not share a strict hierarchy or a blocking dependency. Where a parent-and-sub-issue relationship implies that work has been broken down into smaller pieces, and a "blocked by" link implies sequencing, "Relates to" simply signals that two items are relevant to one another. That might apply to a bug that touches the same code path as a planned feature, or to parallel discussions that inform each other without one strictly depending on the other. Because the feature is in public preview, its behavior and interface may change before it reaches general availability, and GitHub typically uses this stage to gather user feedback and refine functionality.

At the same time, multi-select fields in GitHub Projects have moved to general availability, meaning the capability is now considered stable and supported for everyday production use. A multi-select field extends the existing single-select option by allowing a single item to hold several predefined values at once. Teams can use it to tag an issue with multiple affected platforms, components, product areas, or owning teams without creating a separate field for each dimension or overloading labels. General availability indicates that the feature has completed its preview period and is broadly rolled out, so teams can adopt it with a reasonable expectation of continuity.

To understand why these additions matter, it helps to recall how GitHub Projects fits together. Projects is a planning layer built on top of Issues and pull requests, letting teams organize work into tables, boards, and roadmaps while attaching custom fields such as text, number, date, single-select, and iteration values. Over the past couple of years GitHub has steadily expanded the structured data available for issues, adding capabilities like issue types and sub-issues so that work items can carry more meaning than a title and a set of labels. The "Relates to" link and multi-select fields continue that trajectory, giving teams more formal ways to describe both the connections between issues and the attributes of each item.

The updates also bring GitHub's native tooling closer to conventions found in dedicated project-management platforms. Tools such as Jira have long offered configurable link types, including a "relates to" style connection, alongside multi-value fields, and newer trackers like Linear and Asana emphasize structured relationships and tagging as well. By offering comparable features inside the same environment where code, reviews, and automation already live, GitHub appears to be reducing the friction that leads some teams to synchronize issues with a separate system. For organizations that prefer to keep planning and development in one place, that consolidation is likely the main practical benefit.

There are some caveats worth keeping in mind. Public preview status means the "Relates to" relationship is not yet guaranteed to be final, so early adopters should expect possible adjustments and should be cautious about building critical workflows or automation around it before it graduates. Multi-select fields, now generally available, are on firmer footing, but teams introducing them at scale may still want to plan their field taxonomy carefully, since an abundance of overlapping options can make filtering and reporting harder to interpret rather than easier.

Both changes are incremental rather than sweeping, and neither replaces existing relationship types or field options. Instead, they add flexibility to how issues are linked and described. Teams interested in trying the new relationship can enable it through the issue interface where relationships are managed, while multi-select fields can be configured in a project's field settings. As with other changelog entries, GitHub is expected to iterate based on how users adopt the features, particularly the preview relationship, over the coming months.