Your engineers don't live in your QMS. They live in Linear or Jira. That's where the work actually happens — where a feature gets scoped, a bug gets triaged, a sprint gets shipped.
Until today, the only way to tie that work back to a regulated artifact was to type the issue key into a Markdown field and hope nobody renamed it. Now Lightworks reads from Linear and Jira directly. Link records to issues, see status update in place, and let the traceability matrix include the work that proves your design controls actually happened.
What a Connection Does
A connection authorizes Lightworks to read issues from one Linear workspace or one Jira site. Once it's set up, two things become possible.
Link properties on any database. Add an "Issues" property to your Requirements database, your Risk Register, your CAPA log, your Complaints intake. Pick the issue from a typeahead. The issue title, status, assignee, and URL render inline on the record and update whenever Lightworks refreshes — no webhook plumbing on your end.
Issue references in document bodies. Paste a Linear or Jira URL into any Markdown body and it expands into a live reference. Hover for the current status. Click to jump into the source tool. The link is a stable identifier, not a snapshot, so closing a ticket in Linear immediately reflects in the QMS document that depends on it.
Read-Only, On Purpose
The connection is read-only. Lightworks does not create, modify, or close issues in your tracker.
This is deliberate. Linear and Jira are where engineering decisions are made; the QMS is where those decisions get a regulatory wrapper. If a Lightworks reviewer wants to file a defect, they file it in the tracker the engineering team already uses. If an engineer closes a ticket, that closure happened because they finished the work — not because a QMS workflow demanded a status change.
Two systems, one direction. Issues flow into Lightworks. Compliance stays in Lightworks. Nothing leaks the other way.
Traceability That Reflects Reality
The traceability matrix Lightworks auto-generates already pulls relationships between requirements, design outputs, risks, and verification activities. Linear and Jira connections extend that graph one hop further — into the issues that represent the engineering work itself.
A design input now traces to the requirement record, to the linked Linear issue, to the pull request that closed the issue, to the commit that merged the PR. That's a chain an auditor can walk end-to-end without leaving the artifact. No screenshots of Jira boards pasted into a PDF. No spreadsheet that someone updates the week before an inspection. The trace is live, and it points at the systems your team actually uses.
When an issue closes, the linked record shows it closed. When the assignee changes, the linked record shows the new owner. When the issue gets re-opened because the fix didn't hold, your QMS knows.
Two Minutes to Connect
In your Lightworks workspace, head to Settings → Connections.
Linear. Click Connect Linear, sign in, and approve the OAuth scope. Lightworks requests read access to issues and teams. Pick which teams you want exposed to the workspace and save. New issue link properties immediately show those teams in their typeahead.
Jira. Click Connect Jira Cloud, sign in to Atlassian, and authorize the app for the site you want to link. Pick which projects you want exposed and save. Server and Data Center support is on the roadmap — talk to us if that's the gating factor.
A connection belongs to the workspace, not to the user who created it. Tokens are stored encrypted, scoped to the projects or teams you select, and revocable from the same Settings page.
What This Unlocks
The reason QMS data lives separately from engineering data in most regulated companies is that the two systems were never designed to talk to each other. So they don't, and someone fills the gap with manual copying — which is exactly the failure mode the FDA cares about, because copies drift from sources.
When Lightworks reads from Linear and Jira directly, the gap closes. The requirement record references the issue that implements it; the issue's current state is the requirement's view of that work. There is no second copy to keep in sync because there is no second copy at all.
Point a connection at your tracker and tell us what becomes possible.
Lightworks is a Git-native Quality Management System for AI medical device companies. Write your quality docs in Markdown. Store them in GitHub. Let Lightworks handle the compliance.