Rational DOORS, tool to manage requirements across the SDLC
March 02, 2018

Rational DOORS, tool to manage requirements across the SDLC

Qaiser Islam, SPC4 | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation

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.
  • There are a couple of areas where IBM Rational DOORS is quite strong. First, it is part of the IBM CLM solution so the artifacts developed in this module can be easily available for other functions like development and QA. They can link with their stories and test cases and team leads and managers can use traceability matrix to find out where there are gaps in coverage.
  • Comprehensive configuration management functionality (concept of multiple streams and global configuration) is available, which can be helpful if you need to implement configuration management scenarios for your product or project. For example, a certain version of a requirement can be linked with one story and another version of same requirement can be linked with another story. This is the unique feature which other current tools in the market don't provide.
  • It's highly customizable so you can configure the project areas based on your need. You can have your own requirement types, and you can define templates to speed up the process. Comprehensive review functionality is there as well.
  • Wireframes are quite basic. If you need intuitive and interactive wireframes to elaborate the requirements. you probably need to define outside the tool and then upload as image.
  • ER (define data dictionaries) modeling is not there.
  • Use case modeling is quite basic. You can visualize the use case and actors relation but the tool does not enforce the rules.
  • Does not support offline work.
  • It's part of CLM suite so it can be used to manage the whole lifecycle with tight integration with development module (Rational Team Concert) and quality module (Rational Quality Manager).
  • Comprehensive reports and dashboards provide better visibility.
  • License cost is on higher side.
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.
Very good tool for requirements management like baselining the requirements, traceability across the lifecyle, coverage matrixes, working on multiple version of requirement at a time, etc. But not up to the mark for requirement development activities like developing interactive wireframes, data modeling, BPMN, or Use case modeling. Also it does not support offline work.

Using IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation

20 - System Analysts and Business Analysts
2 - Requirement Analysis background with good experience in trouble shooting
  • Business Requirement management
  • System Requirement Management
  • Requirement Traceability