Introduction to Change Management for Rational DOORS

Change Management for Rational® DOORS® is a tool used to enforce a formal process for the modification of your requirements, track the implementation of requirements by linking them with change requests or work items, and gather requirements by importing data from change management tools to serve as the basis for a new Rational DOORS document.

Using change management for Rational DOORS

Before you can use the change management feature, you must prepare your change management server and configure the feature. For details, see:

After your change management server has been prepared and configured, the feature is ready to use. Change Management for Rational DOORS offers capabilities that can be grouped into three categories:

Using the requirements change management features, you can do these tasks:

Propose a change to a system at a high level.
Categorize a change into one or more requirements change requests (RCRs).
Propose, review, and apply changes to requirements in association with the requests.

With requirements implementation, users can do the following tasks:

Trace requirements through to implementation.
Obtain immediate visibility when requirements are implemented.
Determine the project status based on how many requirements are fulfilled.
Assess the requirements changes impact on the project.

Users can import enhancement requests from their change management software into Rational DOORS to use as the basis for a new Rational DOORS document.

Features

Using Change Management for Rational DOORS, you can perform the following tasks:

Create one or more implementation requests (IRs) for a requirement.
Associate one or more existing implementation requests with one or more requirements.
Directly access implementation request information in Rational DOORS requirement objects.
Run activity reports for requirements modules, showing the requirements associated with the change requests (CRs) that implement the requirement.
Create, view, or modify CRs.
Import CRs from your change management software into Rational DOORS.
Propose changes to requirements and associate the proposed changes to CRs.
Review CRs and the associated proposed requirement changes.
Apply proposed requirement changes to Rational DOORS.

Benefits

Using Change Management for Rational DOORS, your organization can implement a requirements-driven development process with the following benefits:

Clearly defined and communicated requirements, which improves the focus of the development team and reduces rework and improving productivity.
Automatic establishment of the relationships between requirements and related development activities, which improves process control and productivity.
Real-time visibility of the relationships between requirements and development activities, which helps reduce feature creep and streamlines development.
Ability to import enhancement requests and defects submitted by users to be used as a basis for new requirements, which provides traceability and reuse of customer-reported issues.