Overview of DOORS Next

IBM® Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next is a requirements management application that helps you store, categorize, link, and share product requirements with stakeholders such as reviewers, designers, testers, and developers.

DOORS Next is the requirements management application in the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management solution, which integrates IBM products to provide a complete set of applications for software or systems development. DOORS Next uses a web client and the Jazz platform to define, manage, and report on requirements.

The following diagram shows the development lifecycle that the solutions support. To see overviews of the applications that are represented in the image, click the boxes.

Create a single view of requirements

Stakeholder, business, system, product, hardware, software, and other requirements represent business needs from different perspectives with different levels of detail. Requirements have several formats, such as diagrams, tables, forms, and text. Usually, several people are involved in creating, analyzing, reviewing, approving, designing, and developing requirements.

DOORS Next can store multiple types of requirements in a common repository. Bringing all requirements together in a single place, removing redundancy, and connecting related content is essential to effectively managing requirements in large projects.

For an interactive workflow diagram of the requirements definition and management process, see Getting started with IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next.

Trace linkages between requirements

Requirements are often related in many ways. Business requirements drive product requirements, which in turn drive hardware and software requirements. Product requirements cascade to component requirements and granular requirements are linked to more comprehensive requirements. The result is a web of relationships with many dependencies.

With DOORS Next, you can create relationships between requirement artifacts. You can then use grid or tree views to see top-level or drilled-down views of those links.

For more information, see Traceability.

Evaluate the impact of changes to requirement

As a product evolves, initial requirements can change or be removed during development. Because requirements are linked, a change in one requirement can affect other requirements. The Links Explorer in DOORS Next graphically displays the links between artifacts. When an artifact changes, the Links Explorer automatically flags all links from that artifact as suspect. By tracing the suspect links, you can identify all requirements that are affected by a change.

For more information, see Linking to development, design, test, and requirements artifacts.

Create review workflows

DOORS Next encourages collaboration through reviews. You can set up reviews of requirements and identify reviewers. As a review owner, you can see the progress, comments, and status of all participants in the review. You can broadcast emails, leave instructions, or even change the status of the review. As a reviewer, you can leave comments and vote.

For more information, see Requirement workflows.

Monitor project performance with metrics

By default, metrics are collected at regular intervals to provide the most recent view of data and trends over time, which can help you evaluate the ongoing health of your project. For example, the “Requirements covered by test cases” metric monitors the extent to which requirements are covered by test cases over time.

The data warehouse can also provide detailed traceability for requirements. For example, you can see all work items that implement a set of requirements, along with properties such as status, priority, story points, and due date.

For more information, see Reporting.

Baseline projects and track change history

DOORS Next tracks and records metadata to measure project efficiency and churn, such as who modified information, and which changes occurred when.

You can capture baselines of your project requirements for a snapshot of your project at a point in time. You can compare projects against a previous baseline to determine what’s changed.

DOORS Next stores the history of changes to artifacts. You can access all revisions of an artifact to see which modifications occurred when. You can also use the historical record of an artifact to undo any changes and restore the artifact to a previous state.

For more information, see Baselines in requirements projects.

Extend functionality with APIs

DOORS Next provides a client extension API that you can use to extend tool functionality by using technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. You can create and host a catalog of extensions on a server so that your team can share them.

For more information, see Extending DOORS Next.

Configuration management

You can use configuration management in the DOORS Next application to create versions of requirement artifacts and to link them to other team artifacts, such as test cases and designs. Use configurations (streams and baselines) to manage reuse, traceability, and parallel development. Teams by using configuration management enabled Engineering Lifecycle Management applications can contribute requirements, design, test, and source configurations to global configurations. Global configurations ensure artifact links resolve to the correct versions, and also facilitate reuse across versions or variants of your software or product line. For more information about configurations, see Getting started with configuration management.

Exchange requirements data with OSLC and ReqIF

The software architecture for the DOORS Next application is based on the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specification, which uses a common set of resources, formats, and REST architectural services to enable data sharing between applications. You can use the OSLC integration protocol to link requirements in IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS with artifacts in DOORS Next.

You can exchange requirements data between the two products by using ReqIF, which is an evolution of the Requirements Interchange Format that is governed by the Object Management Group (OMG). With ReqIF, teams in different organizations can use different IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next tools to work on shared specifications to construct a consistent view of a solution. For more information, see Importing and Exporting ReqIF files.