Rational DOORS - Features and benefits - Requirements management

A collaborative requirements management environment
As soon as teams start using IBM® Rational® DOORS®, they quickly find that the information it makes available is invaluable. From the first requirements decomposition, DOORS provides:

Collaboration across your supply chain
Rational DOORS manages requirements documents online, using a central repository that’s available to your entire team, so everyone can access the latest requirements. Plus, each requirement contains a unique identifier and attributes. All users work in the central requirements database. And because IBM Rational DOORS enables users to lock sections of documents for editing, multiple users can view and update documents simultaneously, without the danger of conflicting changes.

Power users such as systems engineers or requirements analysts have access to full editing, configuration, analysis and reporting capabilities through a comprehensive desktop client, while other stakeholders such as managers, marketing professionals and development and QA teams can view, edit and discuss requirements using a standard Web browser (Rational DOORS Web Access™ ).

Furthermore Rational DOORS supports the Requirements Interchange Format, which allows suppliers and development partners to be directly involved in the development process by contributing entire requirements documents, specific sections or attributes which can be traced back to central requirements.

Gap analysis of unaddressed requirements
Rational DOORS delivers a comprehensive environment for requirements management. In a single view, DOORS can record and display requirements text, graphics, tables, requirements attributes, change bars, traceability links, and more:

• Graphical volatility displays that help users identify the areas of greatest change

• Traceability analysis to help identify areas of risk

• Point-and-click views depicting relevant data for each type of user role

• Comprehensive, multi-level impact reports that highlight everything from the requirements to the tests that are likely to be affected by the next change

Managing changing requirements
Because requirements are the basis for everything else in a project, managing change to those requirements is critical. IBM Rational DOORS provides an out-of-the-box set of requirements change management capabilities. All informal changes are recorded in history, and any other data impacted by those changes are highlighted so that all team members can identify which data may be suspect.

Lifecycle change management
For more formal change control, the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) integrations with Rational change management solutions (PDF, 217KB) offers a flexible process for workgroup-oriented formal reviews. Changes can be reviewed against current requirements, impact reports generated, and a consensus reached before the changes are automatically applied. Lifecycle change management makes requirements change an integral part of the change process for all project artifacts, such as design, code, and tests.

Change proposal system
As an alternative, DOORS offers the change proposal system (CPS), a unique built-in change process for requirements management. CPS is designed as a ready-to-use, non-configurable change process that allows users to group dependent changes together or to create single changes that affect many requirements. Users can even request an email be sent any time the status of their change proposal is updated.