IBM Rational DOORS

IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS former IBM Rational DOORS profits very much from the mighty market position it had till today. It had been the most favored requirement engineering tools suite with the highest investments in the infrastructure concerning hardware, software, and knowledge sources. It was embedded in knowledge sources of test stands, hardware labs, and knowledge database servers. It allowed for some of the highest profit changes and made the fame with it. But the paradigms of requirements engineering change. If not were superseded by completely different approaches for the target solution worlds. The foremost position in the selling tables is unstable if changes are not solved or coped with by the strategist at IBM and their customers. Since the highly successful alternative suits are already at the market, and some are from IBM already the lifecycle for IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS is at the later highs. But the suite is still at the very top and very popular. There are still many problems unsolved and many wishes at the customers to make the use more comfortable and efficient at the overall level. If the time of setting up the software package is passed the adoption get more extended and complicated. There is a lot of work at the stage around and the expertise will be required for a long time from now.

IBM Rational DOORS is great for requirements management and traceability between different documents (called modules). It provides the opportunity to create custom reports that bring in information from several modules. One thing that it does not do well is collaboration since it locks either sections or an entire document at a time.

DOORS works well for requirements management. It's better than using MS Excel especially for a large number of requirements at different levels.

Internal to our company we have several experts who have extended DOORS functionality to include some great features. And these folks are well regarded by IBM as DOORS experts in the industry.

It is quite powerful and robust as a tool for all of our requirements. It is also compatible with HP ALM, our formal test management tool so that we are able to export comprehensive trace matrices for reporting purposes. However, it is a clunky, difficult, and extremely slow tool that is not well adapted to agile software development.

It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.

DOORS is a very specific piece of software. It is suited to managing contract/project requirements. It works well to list and connect a lot of data, and then gives you the opportunity to show these relationships in several different ways, both graphical and in reports. The software is costly, so your project needs to be large enough to support it.

If you are using IBM software and more importantly, if you have work with huge process flows (and lots of resources invested on it), DOORS is the way to go. On the other hand, if you have mostly an IT focused agile team or your project is not too big, I can't recommend its use.