Comparison of DOORS and DOORS Next

IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS (DOORS) and IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next (DOORS Next) are requirements management (RM) products with many similar capabilities. However, the products offer different implementations and strategic opportunities for requirements analysts and design, development, and test teams.

DOORS, which is in version 9, is a market-leading RM solution. It provides a wide range of RM capabilities and a rich scripting language. DOORS also integrates with other products and has a large, active community of users. This product works well for the largest programs and projects and also for smaller teams.

DOORS Next is an RM collaboration platform with a web client. This product includes capabilities such as visual requirements definition, work item and test integration, and planning. It runs as an application on the Jazz® server and can be installed and integrated with other IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) products.

Both products provide traceability to manage requirements across the development lifecycle, support requirements-driven development and testing, and link to design and modeling resources. In addition, the products can be used together. For example, you can link requirements and related artifacts across the two products. Modules and objects that are exported from DOORS can be imported into DOORS Next.

To watch a video which compares DOORS and DOORS Next, go to YouTube.

Capabilities and strengths

DOORS helps teams in complex, high-compliance, systems engineering programs. It provides mature capabilities, such as structured requirements specification modules, roundtrip data import and export, electronic signatures, baselines, and customizable requirements views with multi-level traceability. For offline work or printing, views can be exported to document formats or spreadsheets. DOORS also supports requirements change management which is driven by a process defined in a change management tool. This product can be scaled to large development projects with tens of thousands of objects or hundreds of concurrent users.

DOORS offers a user-programmable, extensible API called the DOORS eXtension Language (DXL). DXL provides a way to customize these activities:
  • Automating administration
  • Creating multi-level traceability views
  • Calculating metrics
  • Implementing business logic
  • Extending the user interface
  • Integrating with other tools

Along with the RM capabilities of the DOORS client and built-in database, the optional IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS - Web Access (DWA) component supports review and common editing tasks in a web browser. DWA is ideal for distributed teams that do not require the full capabilities of the DOORS client.

DOORS Next uses the capabilities of Jazz Team Server to support team collaboration through dashboards, reviews, and comments. Users, projects, data types, artifact types, attributes, and tags have a common administration. These common services and type systems help project teams consistently define and manage requirements.

In ELM, project areas, team members, and processes are managed across associated applications: Requirements Management (RM), Quality Management (QM), and Change and Configuration Management (CCM). Because a commercial database is used, system and project administrators can follow flexible and standardized operational procedures.

The web client for DOORS Next provides tools to define requirements in rich-text documents and visual representations in business process diagrams, use case diagrams, storyboards, user interface sketches, and screen flows. Requirement artifacts can be organized and reused in views, collections, and modules. The web client supports traceability links to related requirements artifacts and across ELM applications to development plans, work items, test plans, test cases, designs, and models.

For document generation, DOORS and DOORS Next use the capabilities of Engineering Document Generation and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Publishing to create customizable, dashboard-based graphical reports.

For a high-level comparison of the client and server architecture in both tools, see the next diagram.

The diagram provides a high-level comparison of the client/server architecture in DOORS and DOORS Next.

For more information about DOORS, see the DOORS documentation.

For information about using the ELM, see Getting started with DOORS Next.

For information about the development of DOORS Next as a Jazz.net project, see the DOORS Next page and this blog post.