We’ve put a lot of effort in to the enhancements to IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation 6.0.4, including the following.  For more in-depth detail, see the New &  Noteworthy.

Advancing requirements configuration management

Understanding requirements history and audit trail has been, and continues to be, a fundamental need for requirements management practices. With the introduction of Configuration Management in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation V6.x, the latest release, 6.0.4, now offers stronger support for change sets collecting requirements changes into a deliverable package.

This release provides a more efficient delivery wizard for delivering change sets between different versions (streams), has stronger support for comparison of change sets with a two-way compare and merge capability, much-improved automated conflict resolution and visibility into change sets which have been delivered previously.

Improving ease of use and adoption

Responsiveness of the module editor is very much improved. With a transition from pessimistic to optimistic locking, the time to start editing requirements is reduced, including when working over limited or poorly-performing company networks. When performing reviews on module information, review comments can now be associated with individual requirements rather than gathered against the module as a whole.  To simplify the process of update of larger volumes of information it is now possible to edit data in bulk within a view. As the overall size of data increases, so does an organization’s need to introduce “modules” into their requirements data and support for bulk operations becomes more and more important.

Getting high quality reports out of a requirements management tool is almost as important as getting the data in to the tool in the first place. This release introduces an efficient, view-based, mechanism Engine to generate documentation very quickly when using custom report templates created with the Rational Publishing Engine. Tests have shown up to a 95% improvements in performance for generating these custom reports.

Migration and serviceability

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation V6.0.2 and earlier included graphical editors called “Rational Requirements Composer x,” which were delivered as a Java plug-in. This latest release includes scripts that convert the original Rational Requirements Composer x artifacts into the new Diagram format supported by DNG. Conversion is done in place, so IDs and links remain the same, and the audit trail shows when the conversion is performed.

When migrating your requirements data from DOORS to DOORS Next Generation, you can increase the value of your requirements data by interpreting individual “module type” in the data taken from Rational DOORS and migrating it to project-wide IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation artifact types. Employing a small set of distinct module types reduce the potential for errors in your requirements information and aid reuse.

Rational DOORS Next Generation is part of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management and IBM IoT continuous engineering solution.  New users can try DOORS Next Generation on the cloud by going to https://jazz.net/products/sandbox/?tag=rational-doors-next-generation.  To download and install DOORS Next Generation, go to https://jazz.net/downloads/rational-doors-next-generation/.

Richard Watson
IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation Offering Manager

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