Rational DOORS

IBM® Rational® DOORS® contains proven capabilities that can help increase quality and efficiency by optimizing requirements communication and collaboration. Rational DOORS, a scalable solution for managing project scope and cost, helps your projects meet business goals, satisfy customer needs, and address applicable regulations and standards.

DOORS, a leading solution for requirements management, provides:

• A collaborative requirements management environment that allows all stakeholders to actively participate in the requirements process

• The ability to manage changing requirements

• Powerful life cycle traceability to help teams align their efforts with the business needs and measure the impact that changes will have on everything from business goals to development

• Informal requirements discussions

• Scalability to address your requirements management needs

• Ability to exchange requirements data with other requirements management tools

• Test Tracking Toolkit for small-scale test environments

• Integrates with the enterprise architecture, product portfolio management, model-driven development, quality management, and change and release management solutions from IBM and third party companies.

Requirements Management

A collaborative requirements management environment
As soon as teams start using IBM® Rational® DOORS®, they quickly find that the information it makes available is invaluable. From the first requirements decomposition, DOORS provides:

Collaboration across your supply chain
Rational DOORS manages requirements documents online, using a central repository that’s available to your entire team, so everyone can access the latest requirements. Plus, each requirement contains a unique identifier and attributes. All users work in the central requirements database. And because IBM Rational DOORS enables users to lock sections of documents for editing, multiple users can view and update documents simultaneously, without the danger of conflicting changes.

Power users such as systems engineers or requirements analysts have access to full editing, configuration, analysis and reporting capabilities through a comprehensive desktop client, while other stakeholders such as managers, marketing professionals and development and QA teams can view, edit and discuss requirements using a standard Web browser (Rational DOORS Web Access™ ).

Furthermore Rational DOORS supports the Requirements Interchange Format, which allows suppliers and development partners to be directly involved in the development process by contributing entire requirements documents, specific sections or attributes which can be traced back to central requirements.

Gap analysis of unaddressed requirements
Rational DOORS delivers a comprehensive environment for requirements management. In a single view, DOORS can record and display requirements text, graphics, tables, requirements attributes, change bars, traceability links, and more:

• Graphical volatility displays that help users identify the areas of greatest change

• Traceability analysis to help identify areas of risk

• Point-and-click views depicting relevant data for each type of user role

• Comprehensive, multi-level impact reports that highlight everything from the requirements to the tests that are likely to be affected by the next change

Managing changing requirements
Because requirements are the basis for everything else in a project, managing change to those requirements is critical. IBM Rational DOORS provides an out-of-the-box set of requirements change management capabilities. All informal changes are recorded in history, and any other data impacted by those changes are highlighted so that all team members can identify which data may be suspect.

Lifecycle change management
For more formal change control, the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) integrations with Rational change management solutions (PDF, 217KB) offers a flexible process for workgroup-oriented formal reviews. Changes can be reviewed against current requirements, impact reports generated, and a consensus reached before the changes are automatically applied. Lifecycle change management makes requirements change an integral part of the change process for all project artifacts, such as design, code, and tests.

Change proposal system
As an alternative, DOORS offers the change proposal system (CPS), a unique built-in change process for requirements management. CPS is designed as a ready-to-use, non-configurable change process that allows users to group dependent changes together or to create single changes that affect many requirements. Users can even request an email be sent any time the status of their change proposal is updated.

Traceability

Creating traceability with IBM® Rational® DOORS® is as simple as drag and drop between items on the screen. Link a requirement to a design item, to a test case or to another requirement with the click of a mouse.

Alternatively, pick the requirements from a list, or even enter requirement numbers as attributes and have DOORS make the links for you. DOORS lets you define the purpose of links or add explanations with link attributes. For projects with process improvement goals, rules for link creation and direction can be defined, which helps users follow the process and prevent careless mistakes. With the addition of link information to history records, DOORS continues to provide state-of-the-art linking and traceability capabilities to make it a leading requirements management and traceability solution for projects serious about success.

Rational DOORS is unique in providing end-to-end traceability reports in a single view, which can help analysts and project managers prioritize development work more efficiently and predict delivery time more accurately. DOORS offers teams a complete picture of traceability from user requirements through systems and software requirements to designs, tests and implementation tasks.

DOORS also provides support for external links which enables requirements to be directly associated with information outside of the DOORS domain. As traceability needs to be traversed in both directions, DOORS provides support for standard URL technology taking you directly to DOORS elements including Objects, Baselines, Modules, Folders, Projects or even the database as a whole. For example, requirements can be sent via email and viewed in DOORS Web Access or DOORS (where DOORS is installed on users' desktops). This combination of external links and standard URLs fully supports traceability between information in DOORS and in other repositories.

Scaleability

IBM® Rational® DOORS® has proven itself on some of the world's largest projects, in some cases managing millions of requirements and hundreds of thousands of traceability links in a single database. The familiar explorer-like hierarchy with multiple levels of both folders and projects means that no matter how big the database gets, it is still easy to navigate.

Configurable views enable users to see only what is needed, allowing them to focus their effort where it is needed. Sharable documents let users work concurrently to produce a single document.

DOORS continues to offer a comprehensive solution for all requirements management needs through innovative and unique capabilities from Intelligent Traceability™, providing links to and from baselines, to Proactive Suspect Links which displays changes to related data within your document. With an integrated system to formally manage requirements changes and the only built-in graphical requirements tool, DOORS remains an outstanding solution for your project's requirements management needs.

Test Tracking Toolkit

The ability to internally manage small numbers of test cases makes IBM® Rational® DOORS® an ideal solution for smaller testing environments. The test tracking toolkit within DOORS enables you to create links from requirements to test, so you can:

• Define manual test instructions and link them back to the original requirements

• Instigate and record the results of test runs

• Compare results from different test runs to see what has changed

• Interrogate requirements for requirements coverage and test status

With the DOORS test tracking toolkit, small-scale testing environments can define test cases, record, compare test runs, and ensure that all requirements are covered by test cases.

Rational Integrations

IBM Rational DOORS and Quality Manager
IBM® Rational® DOORS® integrates with IBM Rational Quality Manager, so you can base your test plans on your requirements and also link your test plans to them. With this approach, you can easily see when there are outstanding defects from a run of test cases that are linked to each of your requirements. Plus, you can measure the performance of the deliverable against the critical business requirements, rather than simply measuring against the results of the tests. Furthermore, analysts and testers can collaborate early in the lifecycle when requirements are developed, which can help reduce costly requirements errors, minimizing project rework and improving delivery time.

DOORS and IBM Rational change management software
The OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) integration of IBM Rational DOORS and IBM Rational change management software delivers comprehensive requirements change control for Rational DOORS users and automates the process of requirements workflow management. The requirements implementation interface ensures complete roundtrip traceability. Reports from Rational DOORS enable analysts to view the impact of changes to the entire system, from requirements, to change requests to code while charts and reports from the change management software show development activities associated with requirements. Teams can have bottom-up traceability back to the original change request and requirements.
The integration now supports the enhanced lifecycle capabilities provided by the IBM Rational enterprise change process (ECP), built on the Rational Change platform.

DOORS and Rational Requirements Composer
The integration of Rational DOORS and Rational Requirements Composer allows organizations to capture and define their high-level requirements using visual techniques and lightweight, ‘lean’ requirements practices, then decompose them in to finer-grained requirements in DOORS. For more information on this and other integration scenarios, visit jazz.net (link resides outside of ibm.com).

DOORS and IBM Rational Publishing Engine
The integration with Rational Publishing Engine extends the DOORS capabilities to extract DOORS data and generate documents by providing the ability to customize or define your own document templates using the intuitive and interactive Document Studio application. In addition Rational Publishing Engine can be used to extract data from multiple Rational and select third party products to produce documents with combined information from multiple sources.

DOORS and IBM Rational Tau
The seamless, role-based integration of IBM Rational Tau® and DOORS provides systems engineers and software developers with fine-grained traceability of their system and software models, easy link creation, and direct navigation between DOORS and Tau.

From Tau, users have full visibility of requirements in Rational DOORS and can link model elements in Tau with DOORS requirements without opening DOORS. DOORS users can readily access both the model and the links whenever needed, such as for traceability report generation and impact analysis.

The components necessary for the integration are present within both products, allowing for fast, easy set-up at no additional cost.

DOORS and IBM Rational Rhapsody
This integration enables requirements to be traced through to systems and embedded software design expressed in UML or SysML models. Requirements scenarios modeled in Rhapsody can be simulated to verify requirement accuracy.

DOORS and IBM Rational Focal Point
IBM Rational Focal Point™, a Web-based product portfolio management solution, adds critical prioritization, decision making, visualization, and planning capabilities to DOORS. With Focal Point's unparalleled decision making support, you can analyze features, product releases, and projects to balance what is most important to your customers against resource availability and cost. Then you can manage, track, and trace the requirements for those features, products, or projects in DOORS.

DOORS and IBM Rational System Architect
Rational DOORS captures and traces strategic business objectives through its integration with IBM Rational System Architect®, a leading solution for enterprise architecture and business process modeling. System Architect builds a foundation for business process optimization and, through its integration with DOORS, ensures that IT remains aligned with business goals.

HP QualityCenter Integration

IBM® Rational® DOORS® and IBM Rational Synergy ™ integrate with HP QualityCenter. This integration provides a complete, enterprise-wide capability that:

• Improves product quality by reducing the risk of overlooked defects, change requests, and requirements
• Enables you to test requirements, rather than just the build to ensure that you deliver the project according to contract

• Improves process maturity by providing the automated transfer of information, a first step in creating a repeatable process

• Shortens development cycles and accelerates time-to-market by improving project communication, collaboration, and information visibility

The Rational DOORS - QualityCenter integration provides QualityCenter users visibility of the requirements to create test cases for traceability. DOORS users with a status report on coverage of requirements by test cases know whether the tests have passed or failed.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration

The integration between IBM® Rational® DOORS® and Microsoft® Team Foundation Server (TFS) enables development teams that use Microsoft Visual Studio® to create and maintain traceability between requirements in DOORS and TFS Work Items in Visual Studio.

The DOORS - TFS integration supports drag-and-drop linking between requirements and work items and provides a synchronization function to keep link information up-to-date.

DOORS also supports external links, which enables requirements to be directly associated with information outside of the DOORS environment. As traceability needs to be traversed in both directions, DOORS provides support for URLs that take you directly to DOORS elements including Objects, Baselines, Modules, Folders, Projects, or even the database as a whole. This combination of external links and URLs promotes full traceability between information held in DOORS and in other repositories.

Drag-and-drop linking between DOORS and Visual Studio
Through simple drag-and-drop, users of either DOORS or Microsoft Visual Studio can create a link between a requirement and a TFS Work Item. The relationship is then visible from either DOORS or Visual Studio. User-defined attributes on the requirement and TFS Work Item can be copied into the link from either environment. Users of DOORS and Visual Studio can then review the relevant information from within their environment; for example, a Visual Studio user can examine the link to see the priority of the requirement in DOORS. By navigating the links, users can review the full details of the related information regardless of whether it's a DOORS requirement or a TFS Work Item.

Viewing and reporting traceability
Within DOORS, a requirements engineer or business analyst can create a custom traceability report that pulls live data from within TFS to show full lifecycle traceability from user requirements in DOORS to development artifacts in TFS. In Visual Studio, the developer has a new custom-built view showing the selected Work Items with all related DOORS requirements displayed as elements within a hierarchy. By showing traceability back to requirements, developers understand the full context of what they are building as well as gaining a starting point for creating new links using drag-and-drop.

Keeping link information up-to-date
To ensure that traceability information remains current, the integration synchronizes information on either side of any existing links. For example, if objects on either side have been deleted, the links are removed. If data is stored on the other side of the link, it is also updated if it has since been modified.

Informal Discussion

With IBM® Rational® DOORS® Discussions, users can open discussion topics regarding a requirement, and stakeholders can make comments about them. Each comment is stamped with the name of the contributor and the date and time that the comment was made. When discussion topics are concluded, they can be closed. The environment is open to more than just DOORS desktop clients: DOORS Web Access™ users can also join in and participate in DOORS Discussions. This capability extends the stakeholder audience so that many more users can contribute to improving requirements definition and communication.

DOORS also provides support for external links, which enables requirements to be directly associated with information outside of the DOORS environment. As traceability needs to be traversed in both directions, DOORS provides support for URLs that take you directly to DOORS elements including Objects, Baselines, Modules, Folders, Projects, or even the database as a whole. This combination of external links and URLs provides full support for traceability between DOORS information and information in other repositories.

 

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