Overview of Rational DOORS Next Generation

IBM® Rational® DOORS® Next Generation is a requirements management tool that leverages a web client and IBM Rational Jazz platform. Rational DOORS Next Generation equips teams with requirements definition and management capabilities, a work item system for task management and planning, and a reporting system.

You can use the Requirements Management (RM) application to define, manage, and report on requirements in a lifecycle development project. The capabilities that are provided by this application are licensed as IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation.

Rational DOORS license holders are entitled to Jazz license keys for Rational DOORS Next Generation. For more information, see the Rational License Key Center. Rational DOORS Next Generation provides capabilities that are delivered in a number of applications that are deployed on the Jazz® Team Server:
  • The Requirements Management application (RM) delivers visual requirements definition and requirements management capabilities.
  • The Change and Configuration Management (CCM) application delivers task management, planning, and dashboard capabilities.
  • The Quality Management (QM) application delivers testing and test management capabilities.
  • Jazz Reporting Service delivers reporting tools for communicating key performance indicators (KPIs) and project status.
  • The Design Management application delivers design management capabilities.

For an interactive workflow diagram of the requirements definition and management process, see Getting started with requirements management.

Requirement management capabilities

In the RM application, you can define, elicit, capture, elaborate, discuss, and review requirements and supporting artifacts with your extended stakeholder community. Teams can manage requirements using attributes, tags, filtered views, custom artifact types and link types, change indicators, and project dashboards. In the context of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM), the RM application extends traceability and collaboration to development, design, and test artifacts.

Configuration management

You can use configuration management in the RM 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 using configuration management enabled CLM 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.

Requirement management tasks

Requirements engineers, business analysts, and software development teams can use the RM application to do the following tasks:
  • Capture background information, stakeholder needs, project objectives, and other information in rich-text artifacts.
  • Create custom artifact types, attributes, data types, link types, and project templates.
  • Extract requirement artifacts from documents.
  • Express current and proposed processes and specify system usage as business process diagrams and use case diagrams.
  • Mock up user interfaces with diagrams and wireframes.
  • Create links from elements in one artifact to other project artifacts, or link to external web sites.
  • Create and view suspect traceability links to monitor the impact of changes to linked artifacts
    Note: In projects that are configuration management enabled, you can monitor the impact of changes to linked artifacts using link validity.
  • Review artifacts as a team and embed comments.
  • Create project baselines.
  • Create and manage streams and change sets in projects that are enabled for configuration management.
  • Create artifact collections.
  • Create artifact modules.
  • Associate requirements collections and modules with development and test plans.
  • Associate requirements with work items and test cases.
  • Create traceability between requirements and models and design resources.
  • Define glossaries and create terms that are integrated with project artifacts.
  • Generate reports.
  • Create requirements from document text and other elements.
  • Import requirement artifacts from CSV files and from ReqIF files.

RM application and OSLC

The RM application is built on the Jazz integration platform. The software architecture for the RM application in CLM is based on an Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specification, which uses a common set of resources, formats, and REST architectural services to enable data sharing between CLM applications. OSLC provides an open, scalable set of specifications for integrating tools in heterogeneous development environments. The data sharing supports linking that is based on HTTP protocol, identification of resources by URIs, and information retrieval using industry standard media types. The collaboration server and data sharing are secured using the standard HTTP authentication mechanisms and OAuth authorization protocol.

You can use OSLC integration protocol to link requirements in Rational DOORS with artifacts in the RM application. 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 and can use different requirements management tools to work on shared specifications to construct a consistent view of a solution. For information about ReqIF import and export, including restrictions and limitations, see Importing and Exporting ReqIF files.

To watch a tour of the Requirements Management application, see RM application overview.