In case you missed last year’s announcement, IBM Engineering Requirements Management – DOORS Next (DOORS Next) is the new name for IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation (RDNG or DNG). For more details, please see: Renaming the IBM Continuous Engineering Portfolio. V7.0 implements this renaming as well as the modernization of the user interface look and feel.

DOORS Next V7.0 improvements are focused on product scale, resilience, and throughput. This release also simplifies requirements exchange across your value chain that typically involves customers and suppliers.

• A new data architecture consistent with the rest of ELM
• 9x improvement in data scale for each RM application server based on release testing. Support for 20 million artifacts per-server (Oracle) and 10 million artifacts per-server (DB2) for 500 concurrent users with a smaller server footprint. Where more scale is required, we continue to support and recommend multiple RM server environments connected to a single Jazz Team Server. A performance report will be available here on jazz.net in the deployment wiki soon after the release.
• Performance at scale offers more graceful degradation with many instances of functions running faster
• Dependency on Apache Jena technology is significantly reduced and this greatly increases the robustness of the server architecture
• The new data architecture allows organizations to perform more efficient systems monitoring using MBean technology in line with the rest of ELM

Capacity planning, performance, and monitoring

• Now more reliable and less resource hungry. Enterprise monitoring underpins capacity planning with insights into trends and behavior based on real data. Being proactive will maximize operational service
• “Mbeans” allow organizations to monitor their deployments to monitor overall systems’ health and can feed into other support systems for analytics and notification. Information for ELM beans can be found here with more specific MBeans for DOORS Next here.

Value chain: working with customers and suppliers:

• Automatic data type mapping. Working with customers and suppliers often involves receiving data over which you have little control and bringing it into your project areas. Where possible, it is always advised to bring data into a component or project area that is specific to that supplier. This release introduces a way to automatically map Engineering Requirements Management DOORS data into Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next data types in such a way that round-tripping becomes more reliable, requires less manual effort, and can be managed among different suppliers.
• Tagging missing data. IBM typically recommends that requirements are never deleted in a specification because they improve visibility for an audit trail. When working with suppliers, data may be missing in a returned data exchange and one must decide whether to interpret that as requirements have been deleted by the supplier or simply were not included in an exchange. Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next V7.0 introduces tagging to imported data so filters can be used to manage this situation.

Usability

As with all releases, we have taken the opportunity to introduce as many usability improvements as we can. More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy documentation. If you have other improvements you would like to point out, feel free to submit enhancement requests here and tag me in the discussion if you have any specific questions, @richard_watson.

Other functional changes

This is a major release and at this time we have chosen to make some functional changes.

• Link suspicion and validity are now consolidated to the single capability of link validity.
  • A key requirement for any requirements tool is to understand change. It is essential to monitor, understand, and take action for engineering changes.
  • Consolidating suspect links and link validity reduces the user cost for transitioning from a single version of requirements to requirements under configuration management and brings consistency for decision-making regarding impact analysis of related engineering changes.
• We have simplified history-related entries for module modifications, and this impacts the calculation for Change set dependencies; more improvements are expected in this area in coming releases.
• Some functions have been removed in this release:
  • The built-in capability for ReqPro migration.
  • The component used to view old-style diagrams. All previously created RRCx-based drawings should be converted to the new diagram format before migrating to Engineering Requirements Management V7.0.
  • TRS (tracked resource sets) V1.0 feeds. All integrations have used TRS V2.0 for some releases.
  • Specific features to resolve data spills are not available in this release but are expected to return in a future release.

Prepare for upgrade

As with any major release, consideration should be taken regarding product and data migration.  Prepare and plan for offline migration. Upgrade transforms your data and moves most of the original Jena based index information into the underlying database.

• Take a backup
• Migrate in a test environment first for verification of procedure. Tuning your migration environment can have a large impact on the required downtime.
• Convert your RRCx diagrams before migration. Clear all suspect links, since suspicion will not be migrated.

IBM Engineering Requirements Management- DOORS Next is part of the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management solution. New users can try it out in our jazz.net Previews or a cloud trial. More experienced users can download Engineering Requirements Management here.

I hope you enjoy this much-anticipated release.

Richard Watson
ELM Offering Management

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