My Review of DOORS

It’s been well over a month since I submitted my latest review for DOORS via the IBM website (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/doors/). My review has not been posted and I have not been contacted by IBM to explain why my review was not posted. Last year I submitted a similar review that was rejected nearly a month after I posted it. I made the mistake of mentioning a competitor’s product, which understandably they don’t allow.

IBM’s product pages masquerade as a venue where customers can leave honest and open feedback for the products that they’ve purchased. The reality is, only reviews that IBM approves are posted. If IBM wants to censor critical feedback, it should stick to testimonials. Selectively posting reviews is patently dishonest, and in my opinion, is borderline unethical.

Yes, IBM has posted two negative reviews for DOORS. However, only one is substantive and it’s accompanied with a rebuttal. It begs the question, how many negative reviews have truly been submitted only to be swept under the rug? The star ratings and customer satisfaction percentages are a complete sham.

Below you will find the unedited review that I submitted for DOORS.
DOORS is incredibly antiquated with a cumbersome user interface that clearly hasn't been refreshed in years. Version 9 did get a pretty new splash screen though, and a new selection of colors that won’t immediately put you to sleep. In a review published in Dr. Dobb's that is now over 11 years old ( http://www.drdobbs.com/184415706 ) the author notes:"I found DOORS less intuitive to use than the other products. In general the user interface felt inefficient and required considerable “mousing around” from one dialog box to another. For example to edit a requirement’s attributes you must select the requirement then select the attribute to edit and then edit the values in another dialog box. Defining requirement links through the link matrix is clumsy but DOORS also provides several other link definition mechanisms."

I had to do a double take at the issue date after reading that paragraph because it perfectly describes the look-and-feel of the current release of DOORS. I can’t think of many other tools that absolutely make my blood boil when I have to interface with them. There have been so many occasions where I’ve lost work when undocking my laptop to run to a meeting without forgetting to save (DOORS immediately exits the program without saving or backing up your work as soon as it can’t phone home to the license server) and have spent countless hours mindlessly waiting for the screen to refresh while working over VPN (DOORS performance is horrible and becomes unmanageable if you don’t have a direct line to the database).

I've posted a number of times in the IBM forums and when pointing out missing features or inefficiencies many will echo yeah it's missing or yeah it's been like that since version 5. In builds as new as 2010, DOORS is still expecting user files to be placed in C:\Program Files. It's as if IBM is perfectly content with essentially selling the same product year after year to companies that are resistant to change. If you need further proof, look at the number of requirements management, configuration management, change management, etc products offered under the Rational Product line. Is IBM really trying to produce great products, or are they more interested in selling maintenance, training, & consulting to old industries that refuse to advance? You be the judge. I’m absolutely astonished at the rating for this product because DOORS is an absolute joke on my current program. Yes, you get the gray beards who have been using it for over 20 years and know nothing else, who think it’s “fine” but most people just complain.
JoshD - Fri May 13 19:34:05 EDT 2011

Re: My Review of DOORS
SystemAdmin - Sat May 14 19:39:36 EDT 2011

I think your review is fair and IBM should not take it to heart that it is a criticism of them as they are yet to have the opportunity to demonstrate that they can modernise DOORS having acquired it from Telelogic in 2008.

DOORS has had three owners - QSS (1992-2001), Telelogic (2001-2008), IBM Rational (2008 ->).

DOORS was originally targeted for the Defence\Aerospace industries which for decades have had to deal with large scale Systems Integration type projects requiring serious requirements management support. QSS progressed DOORS as far as version 5.2 - version 5 was the last major change to the DOORS client GUI and DB architecture. Whilst some new functionality has been added since, it's base architecture, particularly it's proprietary DB, has not changed much since version 5 and has been bit of a dead weight around it's neck in terms of making it favorable to accommodating long awaited changes.

Telelogic acquired DOORS and promised to modernise it. This led to the now defunct "DOORS XT" product which was an attempt to create a new generation web enabled DOORS product from the ground up and eventually replace the old legacy DOORS product. DOORS XT looked promising and it got to a version 1 release but the initiative died and it disappeared.

Now it's IBM's turn - the IBM development road maps suggest that DOORS version 10 will see it moved onto the IBM Jazz platform and the introduction of a new generation of DOORS product, most likely integrated with the existing IBM Requirements Composer product (I believe the third IBM RM tool offering, RequisitePro, will be discontinued). I hope IBM got the requirements right! Expectations are high.

Paul Miller
Melbourne, Australia

Re: My Review of DOORS
kbmurphy - Sun May 15 21:28:46 EDT 2011

SystemAdmin - Sat May 14 19:39:36 EDT 2011
I think your review is fair and IBM should not take it to heart that it is a criticism of them as they are yet to have the opportunity to demonstrate that they can modernise DOORS having acquired it from Telelogic in 2008.

DOORS has had three owners - QSS (1992-2001), Telelogic (2001-2008), IBM Rational (2008 ->).

DOORS was originally targeted for the Defence\Aerospace industries which for decades have had to deal with large scale Systems Integration type projects requiring serious requirements management support. QSS progressed DOORS as far as version 5.2 - version 5 was the last major change to the DOORS client GUI and DB architecture. Whilst some new functionality has been added since, it's base architecture, particularly it's proprietary DB, has not changed much since version 5 and has been bit of a dead weight around it's neck in terms of making it favorable to accommodating long awaited changes.

Telelogic acquired DOORS and promised to modernise it. This led to the now defunct "DOORS XT" product which was an attempt to create a new generation web enabled DOORS product from the ground up and eventually replace the old legacy DOORS product. DOORS XT looked promising and it got to a version 1 release but the initiative died and it disappeared.

Now it's IBM's turn - the IBM development road maps suggest that DOORS version 10 will see it moved onto the IBM Jazz platform and the introduction of a new generation of DOORS product, most likely integrated with the existing IBM Requirements Composer product (I believe the third IBM RM tool offering, RequisitePro, will be discontinued). I hope IBM got the requirements right! Expectations are high.

Paul Miller
Melbourne, Australia

To the original poster...

I myself feel that I have been blacklisted from ever presenting a white paper at an IBM event because I have been openly critical of DOORS in the past. However, I do think your review is unfair and has misleading information, and perhaps that's why they haven't published it (though it's certainly not an excuse to withhold it).

First, you do not have to edit attributes within dialog boxes. In your module, choose insert>column and then insert the column whose attribute you wish to edit. Save your view and voila, you'll never ever have to edit attributes in dialog boxes. None of my users edit attributes within dialog boxes, unless they are advanced users who want to do multiple object editing of an attribute.

Second, DOORS is antiquated and I'm very frustrated with it myself. However, it's a client/server app that isn't web-based, so you can't just undock your laptop. If that's an issue, I would recommend accessing DOORS via Citrix or Remote Desktop Client of some sort.

Most programs on Windows go into C:\Program Files\, so I'm not sure what your actual complaint is there. You can choose a custom location upon install. Could you elaborate on this one? (I do know that in some environments some extra configuration of DOORS has to occur for things like temp file pointers and such, but these never point to C:\Program Files\.)

Aside from just not being modern, DOORS is great at what it does, which is managing requirements in almost any process. DXL is its biggest strength. But your review also shows the biggest weakness in DOORS: it is essential to have a good administrator and evangelist for DOORS upon rolling it out at any company else it's likely to be perceived as a failure. And sadly, I have not seen good trainers/training in my from Telelogic/IBM. It's a crap shoot. At one of my clients, for instance,IBM taught EVERY USER how to create an attribute as part of its GENERAL TRAINING! So guess what I inherited when I started? I never train users on such things.

I think IBM should publish your review and then respond to its weaknesses in general with statements like I've made here.

Kevin Murphy
http://www.baselinesinc.com

Re: My Review of DOORS
SystemAdmin - Mon May 16 09:52:06 EDT 2011

Hi Josh --
I'm Sera Lewis, and I manage the digital team that publishes the product reviews you see on the site. I'm so sorry to hear that your review wasn't published and that you did not hear from us to explain why. We have two firm rules about reviews: they can't include personal information (names, phone numbers, etc) and they can't mention competitors. We do not edit reviews in any way, so we cannot delete out problematic sentences. (We do also filter for any profanity, but that's typically not an issue.) We absolutely do not filter out negative reviews, and when we do reject a review, we try to contact the submitter to provide detail on what happened.

We do ask our product teams to respond to reviews that are very critical, particularly if we have good news to share about how that feedback will be used to improve our products.

In this specific case, the review submission included a link that our moderators counted as a link to a competitor site, in error. We have overridden the rejection and published the review, and we thank you so much for speaking up about the problem. Please feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to talk more -- sera at us.ibm.com.

Thank you!

Re: My Review of DOORS
llandale - Mon May 16 17:05:47 EDT 2011

kbmurphy - Sun May 15 21:28:46 EDT 2011
To the original poster...

I myself feel that I have been blacklisted from ever presenting a white paper at an IBM event because I have been openly critical of DOORS in the past. However, I do think your review is unfair and has misleading information, and perhaps that's why they haven't published it (though it's certainly not an excuse to withhold it).

First, you do not have to edit attributes within dialog boxes. In your module, choose insert>column and then insert the column whose attribute you wish to edit. Save your view and voila, you'll never ever have to edit attributes in dialog boxes. None of my users edit attributes within dialog boxes, unless they are advanced users who want to do multiple object editing of an attribute.

Second, DOORS is antiquated and I'm very frustrated with it myself. However, it's a client/server app that isn't web-based, so you can't just undock your laptop. If that's an issue, I would recommend accessing DOORS via Citrix or Remote Desktop Client of some sort.

Most programs on Windows go into C:\Program Files\, so I'm not sure what your actual complaint is there. You can choose a custom location upon install. Could you elaborate on this one? (I do know that in some environments some extra configuration of DOORS has to occur for things like temp file pointers and such, but these never point to C:\Program Files\.)

Aside from just not being modern, DOORS is great at what it does, which is managing requirements in almost any process. DXL is its biggest strength. But your review also shows the biggest weakness in DOORS: it is essential to have a good administrator and evangelist for DOORS upon rolling it out at any company else it's likely to be perceived as a failure. And sadly, I have not seen good trainers/training in my from Telelogic/IBM. It's a crap shoot. At one of my clients, for instance,IBM taught EVERY USER how to create an attribute as part of its GENERAL TRAINING! So guess what I inherited when I started? I never train users on such things.

I think IBM should publish your review and then respond to its weaknesses in general with statements like I've made here.

Kevin Murphy
http://www.baselinesinc.com

Years ago I was thrown to the wolves to "administer" this new tool called DOORS. It was worse since the other Admin (who actually knew what he was doing) at the other site hated me ..err.. hated the existence of my position but I digress.

I argued unsucessfully for the notion that while the "Requirements" were "owned" by the COG, the "Module" was owned by me. Without that I could not instill any consistency or reasonableness, and as you implied everyone felt the need to create their own attributes, and their own names, to house whatever info they wanted. None of it matched the other modules. Everyone did what they wanted and the result, surprise, was that nobody was happy with anything.

So yes, there is no reason to teach typical folks how to create attributes since you don't want them to.

  • Louie

Re: My Review of DOORS
JoshD - Mon May 16 18:07:14 EDT 2011

kbmurphy - Sun May 15 21:28:46 EDT 2011
To the original poster...

I myself feel that I have been blacklisted from ever presenting a white paper at an IBM event because I have been openly critical of DOORS in the past. However, I do think your review is unfair and has misleading information, and perhaps that's why they haven't published it (though it's certainly not an excuse to withhold it).

First, you do not have to edit attributes within dialog boxes. In your module, choose insert>column and then insert the column whose attribute you wish to edit. Save your view and voila, you'll never ever have to edit attributes in dialog boxes. None of my users edit attributes within dialog boxes, unless they are advanced users who want to do multiple object editing of an attribute.

Second, DOORS is antiquated and I'm very frustrated with it myself. However, it's a client/server app that isn't web-based, so you can't just undock your laptop. If that's an issue, I would recommend accessing DOORS via Citrix or Remote Desktop Client of some sort.

Most programs on Windows go into C:\Program Files\, so I'm not sure what your actual complaint is there. You can choose a custom location upon install. Could you elaborate on this one? (I do know that in some environments some extra configuration of DOORS has to occur for things like temp file pointers and such, but these never point to C:\Program Files\.)

Aside from just not being modern, DOORS is great at what it does, which is managing requirements in almost any process. DXL is its biggest strength. But your review also shows the biggest weakness in DOORS: it is essential to have a good administrator and evangelist for DOORS upon rolling it out at any company else it's likely to be perceived as a failure. And sadly, I have not seen good trainers/training in my from Telelogic/IBM. It's a crap shoot. At one of my clients, for instance,IBM taught EVERY USER how to create an attribute as part of its GENERAL TRAINING! So guess what I inherited when I started? I never train users on such things.

I think IBM should publish your review and then respond to its weaknesses in general with statements like I've made here.

Kevin Murphy
http://www.baselinesinc.com

> kbmurphy wrote:
> However, I do think your review is unfair and has misleading information, and perhaps that's why they haven't published it (though it's certainly not an excuse to withhold it).

My review is far from unfair or misleading.

> kbmurphy wrote:
> First, you do not have to edit attributes within dialog boxes. In your module, choose insert>column and then insert the column whose attribute you wish to edit. Save your view and voila, you'll never ever have to edit attributes in dialog boxes. None of my users edit attributes within dialog boxes, unless they are advanced users who want to do multiple object editing of an attribute.

I didn't write that. It was published in Dr. Dobbs, and yes, I'm well aware that you can add attributes as columns. However, the point was to illustrate that 11 years after that review, DOORS still requires a TON of mousing around and wading through dialogs. I could go on and on about the inefficiencies of the user interface, so I'll just give you a few examples that require far more mouseketeering than should be required. Yes, I'm aware some of this can be "automated" by writing DXL, but the following tasks are so basic that a user shouldn't have to write DXL
1. Editing Links. Consider trying to change a single parent requirement from one object id to another. Just to do the link, let's see:
- Links Menu (or context menu->Links)
- Edit Links...
- (Wait for database to populate links) Select parent
- Click delete button
- Click Ok Button (or Apply)
And you still haven't established the new parent. I had to do this for an entire section of requirements. What a miserable few hours. I'm sure someone will quickly point out a way to save 1-2 mouse clicks from the above sequence, but it's still way too much mousing.
2. No ctrl-click. Yes, shift click is now supported, but ctrl-click is vital for performing bulk edits of requirements. If you need to make changes to sets of non-contiguous requirements, you have to perform the same steps repeatedly for each block.
3. DOORS presents information as a table, but failed to implement powerful capabilities of tables that would make sense in this type of application like drag fill, cell selection, and keyboard navigation.

> kbmurphy wrote:
> Second, DOORS is antiquated and I'm very frustrated with it myself. However, it's a client/server app that isn't web-based, so you can't just undock your laptop. If that's an issue, I would recommend accessing DOORS via Citrix or Remote Desktop Client of some sort.

Correct, and I don't expect it to magically commit unsaved data to the database without a network connection. However, before forcefully closing itself, it would certainly be reasonable to write unsaved data to a "restore" file on disk (not in C:\Program Files :) ), and then present an option to restore it the next time DOORS is launched. I don't know something like this: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=14533459 DOORS knows that it lost the network connection, it knows that you have unsaved data because edits are made in local memory until the module is saved, and therefore, it knows that by forcing you out it's stripping you of your unsaved work.

> kbmurphy wrote:
> Most programs on Windows go into C:\Program Files\, so I'm not sure what your actual complaint is there. You can choose a custom location upon install. Could you elaborate on this one? (I do know that in some environments some extra configuration of DOORS has to occur for things like temp file pointers and such, but these never point to C:\Program Files\.)

I'm not talking about where the program is installed. I'm referring to where DOORS stores both application configuration and user-specific information. Since Windows 9x, the proper place to do this (and this isn't some obscure feature of Windows) is to use the app data folder. Program Files is for storing the application as installed, not configuration. This is even more problematic when using Vista and Win7 due to the VirtualStore. Here's one example: <DOORS>\lib\dxl\addins\user Whoops!