Discovering work-item relations, in one aspect, may include identifying mappings of work-item elements to standardized specification elements, for instance, by analyzing a plurality of work-item elements and their relationships generated from a description of a collection of work-items, and a plurality of standardized specification elements and their relationships generated from a description of practice guidelines for completing the project. One or more missing relations may be discovered among the plurality of work-item elements based on the mappings.