IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

The established experience contained in most IBM Rational DOORS installations is only compensated by the high flexibility of Atlassian JIRA. The markets state that Jira is less expensive in the setup. There are many manufacturers that support IBM Rational DOORS to have the big tiers as their customers. Jira has problems in that growth. Jira has more features compared to IBM Rational DOORS. For example in cloud support, IBM Rational DOORS relies on improved external services while Jira abstracts in the most modern way. Jira experts have a different professional background compared to that of IBM Rational DOORS. They are indeed from different engineering generations. There is little interchange in personal and ideas.

I would choose IBM Rational DOORS over any other requirements management tool out there. Polarion tries to do too many things and is great for some things but as far as requirements management IBM Rational DOORS is the best tool on the market.

DOORS is the legacy and leading tool for requirements management. It is widely used by the Aerospace industry.

It was easier to do all the change management-related activities, even configurations were handled very effectively. New process definitions and initiatives made it easier for better project deliverables. Effective resource allocations and better reporting and defect management. The overall cost of the tool is great too and well within budget.

We have used TestLink before using IBM Rational Quality Manager and there is no comparison between them as TestLink will lose in every aspect against IBM Rational Quality Manager. I think it was a very good decision to migrate to it instead of TestLink despite the problems in the User Experience.

DOORS is not a suite nor an integrated tool like HP ALM or Rally. It only does one thing and cannot hold defects or accommodate sprint planning. It is older, takes longer to connect and load, and has an inconvenient timeout. It does do a basic job and can be customized to show a clear picture of requirements coverage but it takes some training to use.

Although JIRA is getting popular in DevOps team, it does not work well with ITIL model as RTC does. RTC is still widely used for production management in our company.

CA Service Desk Manager (GSD) is integrated with TPAM which is being used for privilege account management in our company. It cannot be skipped in our production management workflow. But it only provides poor report function, we hardly generate KPI using GSD statistic, so we built RTC as a front layer on top of it. The user only needs to operate on RTC then one click link all the required information to GSD so as to get TPAM is required.

To me, DOORS is like a super version of Excel and Word combined with a relational database. I have not used too many database softwares before, but DOORS does a very specific job well enough. It is so powerful that some of the tools just go unused. Some parts of the software are too complex for the average user.

Requisite Pro (and Rational Requirements Composer, it's successor) is more simple and focused on requirements. Is like a part of DOORS and can be suitable to smaller projects. IT people on the other hand prefer agile tools like JIRA. Of course if the project is big enough, DOORS is a good option to consider.

My organization was already using it when I joined the team.

It's well integrated with IBM products so it provides better coverage across the lifecycle with first class integration. Other producst are stand alone with limited integration with ALM tools.

I found [them] to be more flexible and with the possibility to create [an HTML format].

An alternative which I have very briefly used is Atlassian's JIRA, which is very similar to IBM RTC, although has a modern UI, feels light-weight and is faster to respond and additionally has seamless integration with Bitbucket, which is a Git platform, and other Atlassian products creating a nice ecosystem for an entire organization to be invested in

JIRA is simpler and much more intuitive, especially when bundled with Confluence. TFS is obvious choice if working with Microsoft technologies and has superb API.

This product had many of the same features, was easier to use, which would result in less training, and had a lower price tag. Logic and reason do not always figure prominently in a decision. Sometimes there are intangible characteristics that alter the flow. In my observation, there was a pending reorganization and a major shift in development methodology that were to come. It was believed that alignment with IBM's Rational Team Concert, we would have better overall support from a pre and post sales perspective, as well as any required responses to "break-fix" activity via their customer support line. IBM also has a fairly large user community at Jazz.net, so that forum is also available for research. These types of items were less developed in other vendor offerings.

I have worked on different agile project management tool like JIRA, Teamfoge and RTC. RTC is simple and has a nice UI.

It is easy for the organization to identify what kind of problems there are in the project and how many change requests have been resolved and how many are pending. Thereby the employer can pro-actively arrange the meetings and address the issues to the team members.