IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

IBM Rational DOORS is designed to match paradigms of requirements engineering that matched the state-of-art up to lately 2011. It is still at the top of the list since many engineers have been educated with the paradigms in mind. But as can be already drawn from the name there is a mismatch in concepts that have developed bigger since. This is a package from the broader IBM Rational software suit. This emphasizes the Rational Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System that has been extended by the DOORS eXtension Language (DLX). In the selling logic of IBM, it is superseded by IBM Jazz. For many of my customers, it is a hybrid between knowledge management and lifecycle management. It is important that it is bound against several trusted and approved engineering databases. These are sources of unmatched quality still despite contradicting facts. It is still under development and is supported by the IBM expert team. At IBM the product name is now Engineering Requirements Management DOORS. The product is cross-platform. Clients are Windows, servers are Unix. That has advantages and causes problems. The new focus in the development of the product is to be tech-savvy, enhance simplicity and overview, and grow clarity.

I have used IBM Rational DOORS to manage high-level and low-level requirements as well as test procedures and the linking and traceability between them. I have used IBM Rational DOORS to run reports and wizards for export to show requirements compliance and test and requirements coverage.

DOORS is our tool of choice on large programs with a large number of requirements to manage at various levels of integration.

On my end, I mainly rely on IBM Rational Team Concert to collaborate with colleagues on projects. It has been easy to get notified when there is an amendment on development lifecycle.

As a business analyst, it is great to have such a comprehensive tool at our disposal. During requirement gathering, planning, documenting, and implementation phases of the project this tool really helped us a lot. It was so easy to do so many multiple tasks at ease with the help of this tool such as defining processes itself was so effective.

Effective Agile management system and most powerful IBM solution with a clean easy interface to get started. Easy to configure the interface security and the ability to provide data analytics on IBM Rational Team Concert is amazing and useful to manage multiple project workflow and effective capability on access and also permission management via Cloud services.

IBM Rational Team Concert is a collaborative software development, process configuration, planning, software configuration, reporting etc. The main problem the software solves is making projects more accessible and sharable. It's very useful especially for engineers.

My Department "Quality Department" uses IBM Rational Quality Manager as the main system that holds everything related to Quality like Test Cases, Test Plans, Test Suites, Execution Records, etc. The Application has a lot of features and helped us keep track of all testing activities conducted through different projects across the organization. We keep all of our testing artifacts on it as well.

We use DOORS as a requirements repository for the product and software. We use it to track, edit, and trace requirements coverage. It's used all across the business group I'm a part of amongst many roles. It is robust and large enough for all of our products both current and legacy.

IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) is widely used in my company globally for project planning, task management, incident management, source code control, resource projection etc. It is being used during the whole software development and implementation and post-production cycle. Our tooling team also integrates RTC with other tools, such as GSD, JIRA, Confluence etc. to help us improve work efficiency.

We currently use DOORS to manage the project requirements for one or more projects. We use the software in one department for one or two lines of service that the company offers. DOORS allows us to manage a vast amount of data with relative ease. Although the program is very powerful, it is sometimes difficult to use.

In the many consulting jobs that I have been doing, I have occasionally encountered companies with solid and extensive processes (necessary bureaucracy for manufacturers and factories, since they need to manage big production flows). For projects in that environment, we need extensive traceability tools, like IBM Rational DOORS.

It is being used by Digital Channel Technology team to manage all high-level business requirements in a centralized repository.

In our organization business analysts and systems analyst are using this module to develop their requirement artifacts. We have the complete IBM CLM suite so that other departments like development and QA use these requirement to develop and test the application. This end to end traceability and easy collaboration across the lifecylce help us a lot.

Rational Doors Next Generation (DNG) has been used by the application division of my customer company, and specifically by several functional analysts. The tool appears to have really specific features that allow managing artifacts like embedded documents and stores them in a central repository, and then is able to track with a strict connection the work items and codes. It shows to be a not really easy tool to use. Surely it can give really good benefits enabling the business requirements of the CR and coding activity, but to provide a consistent connection you must always work on the embedded artifact and this scenario is really not so user-friendly.

Plus if you decide to extract the artifact in a Word document after you have modified it, it is not convenient to modify the external document and then import it again because it will not override the previous one with the document versioning. It means that even if there is an import feature it is not easy to repeatedly import the same document in a different session. The graphical design features provided are not very stable. I think that it would be a better choice if the artifacts could be implemented in HTML form and not embedded as an artifact.

IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) is used across our whole organization as a tool to capture a workflow of tasks to be performed per team.

IBM Rational Team Concert is used across entire RnD as source control and ALM tool.

Rational Team Concert - RTC, is being used by a project team to facilitate software development. We define user stories, fill a backlog with epics and stories. We then prioritize and rank the backlog, and groom the stories to match our working velocity for the sprint. Rational Team Concert facilitates the requirements documentation, the sizing of the stories, and tracks our progress when used consistently.

RTC was used as an agile project management purpose for a big program which had distributed 14 agile scrum teams. Each team manages their product and sprint backlog on it. It is easy to track product, sprint burn-down charts, velocity and task board. Managed and tracked impediments, retrospective, defect, user story, Sr. scrum master (scrum coach) can track each teams status and dependency. It is easy customize the field to add in the form for creation of user story, impediment etc.

Our organization used RTC as our comprehensive ALM tool to replace older Rational tools (ClearCase, BuildForge). It was the first tool used to provide work item tracking, which was vital as we were shifting to Agile methodologies. Rational Team Concert helped as unify the tools used across the organization while providing flexibility to different needs across business units.

The whole team uses IBM Rational Team Concert. The main focus is to write change requests which includes implementation work tickets, reviews etc.

We used the RTC suite to handle all aspects of our SDLC from requirements, to development and quality assurance. This was a fairly large project and RTC was hugely beneficial in helping our team complete our goals. The product is nothing short of amazing. Thanks to IBM for creating it.