I am happy to share with you that some of the most frequently requested enhancements have made their way into the new IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next v7.1 release.

And certainly, the most requested feature by far is the ability to create more complex filters on modules using Boolean operators, such as AND and OR to combine simple conditions together. When dealing with large modules, you will now more easily be able to find the relevant artifacts you need to review or update.

On top of that, this new version provides a way for you to view ancestor and descendant artifacts in filtered modules. After applying a filter, you usually do not see the section headings of the artifacts in the result set and therefore you lose the context, making it harder to understand if you have indeed the right set of artifacts you need to work on selected by the filter. With the new option to show ancestors, you can now view the result set in the module hierarchy. The option to show descendants can be used to view the artifacts of only one or a few selected specific sections of the module. Those options can be saved as part of a view and therefore used to then export this view.

Another very popular new feature coming with v7.1 is the creation of baselines in the past. You now have the option to select a date and time when creating a baseline on a RM local stream, giving the ability more easily to get back in time even if no baselines were created at that point. Therefore, the practice of creating daily baselines just in case you might need one of them in the future can be put to a stop (which has the added benefit of reducing the amount of data in the lifecycle query engine data store).

Let me also point out that upgrading an existing RM server instance to v7.1 will require to switch to the new implementation of the TRS component. You can either switch while still using v7.0.2 or v7.0.3, or switch as part of the upgrade process to v7.1. To learn more please see: https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/TRSLogBasedSwitch

In IBM Engineering Test Management v7.1, you will have a new option to enforce that the name created for a new configuration in a component is unique to that component. We have also updated the names of test automation product integration from “Rational Test” to “IBM DevOps Test”.

There are quite a few more new capabilities in this release, I encourage you to read through the What’s new in IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next 7.1 of the product documentation to find out the ones that you might immediately benefit from.

Christophe Telep
Product Manager, IBM Engineering