As mentioned by Daniel Moul in his “Coming soon: IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management V7.0.3” blog post, we have focused our enhancements across ELM in five categories.

For this upcoming DOORS Next V7.0.3 release, we have specifically concentrated our efforts on mainly two of those categories: user productivity and operating at scale. First, I am very pleased to share that we made great progress regarding performance at scale, which will benefit organizations with large deployments of DOORS Next. Teams should experience improved response time for the following use cases among many others:

• Opening views with many attributes and multiple values selected
• Deliver and compare
• Link creation

In the category of user productivity, let me highlight the following new capabilities we are introducing in V7.0.3.

• DOORS Next project administrators can configure whether attributes are significant when calculating link validity status for an artifact type. This will ensure that only changes that really matter are making link suspects, improving user productivity when it comes to analyzing the impact of changes. You can learn more about this topic in this documentation page.
• DOORS Next users can see missing Artifact Types, Artifact Attributes and Attribute Data Types in component streams and restore or recreate them. This will greatly facilitate the maintenance of a consistent type system across many components and configurations. Here is an example of how the delivery of change sets will result in a missing reference: The creation of a new attribute type is done in one change set CS1. Adding a new attribute of that new attribute type to an artifact type done in another change set CS2. Then, only the change set CS2 is delivered to another stream. In that other stream, the attribute type definition is missing. More details are available in this documentation topic.
• A new option is available to configure the change set delivery process into each component streams. This new precondition when selected will enforce that a work item, approved or not, must be linked to a change set before it is delivered to the current stream. This is a lighter variation of the existing precondition that enforces that an approved work item must be linked to a change set before it is delivered to the current stream. This new option enables enforcement of a change management process but with less burden on the end users, boosting their productivity.

I am proud of the work accomplished by our global cross-functional team during this release time frame: they have not only helped our customers be successful with their current deployment of DOORS Next, but also have migrated many of them to the latest version 7.0.2, as well as delivered new enhancements for this upcoming 7.0.3 release that I am sure you will quickly benefit from.

Kind Regards,
Christophe Telep
Product Manager