Master Project support and rollup

Our product architecture (like many of you, I'm sure) is comprised of several "Layer Teams" - backend database processing, middleware web services, and front end Solutions. All of our Projects touch each of these layers in some fashion and force version updates to the packages. Right now we keep each of these Layers in separate projects so that we can Roadmap proposed and ongoing work. The problem with that is that for a given Solution the project is spread over several Layer "projects" and is difficult to actually get a complete status of the Solution project.

I may be missing something but is there a way to have a Master Project that pulls in or references issues from other projects so that status can be determined? If not, what's everyone else doing?