Rational DOORS - Features and benefits - Microsoft TFS 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.