At Innovate this week, we’ve been showing several advanced features that our Requirements Management team is working on.  It’s been exciting to see the interest in the new usability, scripting, and performance features of IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation V5.0, but even more exhilarating to witness the response to Rational DOORS Next Generation with Configuration Management beta.

In addition to the 5.0 release, this week we released the first open beta of Rational DOORS Next Generation, which includes built-in configuration management features. Our largest and most demanding Rational DOORS clients have requested these features for years:

• Parallel streams of requirements that you can create without making copies and baselines of those streams.
• Product variants; for example, to support different geographical areas or products in a product line.
• Comparisons across streams by using graphical comparison editors that detect conflicts and help to resolve them.
• Change sets for isolating, bundling, and tracking changes.
• Change management of requirements in one stream or many. This feature includes the delivery and merging of changes across streams!

We demonstrated these features all week, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.  Our clients can see how they can use Rational DOORS Next Generation with Configuration Management to solve requirements management problems that they haven’t been able to completely solve before, and without writing custom scripts. One exciting example is how Rational DOORS Next Generation with Configuration Management not only manages multiple configurations of requirements, but also consistently manages the links across those configurations, without needing to update or copy the links.

What’s even better is knowing that this beta is just the beginning.  Our plan is to make the configuration management features generally available later this year. We plan to make them part of a federated (cross-tool) configuration management capability that will allow requirements to be part of global configurations that contain other kinds of lifecycle artifacts.  This capability is all part of our larger solution for managing product variation and engineering product lines.  Here at Innovate, we are also showing our product line engineering features in prototype form.

Don’t take my word about requirements under configuration management.  Check it out yourself at:

https://jazz.net/downloads/rational-doors-next-generation/betas/5.0CMBeta1

George DeCandio
IBM Distinguished Engineer
Requirements Definition and Management