Comparing Rational DOORS Next Generation with Rational DOORS
DOORS Next Generation was released for the first time in 2012 extending the DOORS Family with a next generation requirements management tool based on the Rational Jazz technology. DOORS Next Generation has been packaged with Rational DOORS and can be used stand-alone or in conjunction with DOORS 9 for existing users. As we develop Rational DOORS Next Generation we plan to continue to invest in IBM Rational DOORS 9 and provide additional DOORS 9 releases. When you need to determine whether to use Rational DOORS 9 or Rational DOORS Next Generation, consider the answers to these questions:
What is Rational DOORS 9 and how does it relate to DOORS Next Generation?
How do requirements interact with Jazz based products?
What is the fundamental difference in functionality between Rational DOORS Next Generation and Rational DOORS?
How can Rational DOORS Next Generation be introduced to large-scale deployments?
When should I be interested in using Rational DOORS Next Generation?
What is Rational DOORS 9 and how does it relate to DOORS Next Generation?
Rational DOORS has been the market leading requirements management application for at least the last decade. With Rational DOORS, teams can reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve quality by improving communication about, collaboration with, and verification of requirements throughout organizations and across supply chains.
We estimate that at least one million people are active users of Rational DOORS, and that the average specification created and managed in Rational DOORS includes thousands of requirements. Some programs manage hundreds of thousands of requirements each.
DOORS Next Generation takes the best parts of DOORS 9 and recreates a new requirements management tool hosted on top of the IBM Rational Jazz technology platform.
How do requirements interact with Jazz based products?
IBM has established a two-step approach to enable Rational DOORS customers to benefit from the Rational Jazz strategy and investments:
- Step 1: Use DOORS 9 with OSLC services and integrate to Rational Jazz based applications
- Step 2: Move to using DOORS Next Generation which makes direct use of the Jazz Team Server services
The goal of this strategy is to streamline the requirements process and user experience, provide more capabilities to support requirements management, and improve cross-team and cross-product scenarios in a systems and software engineering tool set.
Customers of Rational DOORS 9 can benefit from Jazz platform capabilities today, and we are working on additional integrations to extend the range of lifecycle products DOORS understands. In the language of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), Rational DOORS 9.5 both publishes and consumes Requirements Management integration services, Publishes Reporting services and consumes Change Management (CM), Quality Management (QM) and Design Management (DM). Tools offering CM, QM or DM services integrate to DOORS to offer users the ability to connect DOORS to other lifecycle disciplines. OSLC integrations are not limited to Rational but the IBM produced integrations to Rational Products include:
- Rational Requirements DOORS Next Generation (RM)
- Rational Team Concert (CM)
- Rational Change (CM)
- Rational Clear Quest (CM)
- Rational Quality Manager (QM)
- Rational Design Manager (DM)
- Rational Reporting for Document Generation (Reporting) including Rational Publishing Engine
- Rational Insight (Reporting for metrics)
The Jazz platform is about more than just integrations. Over and above DOORS 9, Rational DOORS Next Generation also uses the various services of the Jazz Team Server, including user administration, security, and query. Common application conventions, such as user experience and design standards, provide a more unified, seamless experience in multi-tool solutions.
Rational DOORS Next Generation introduces a new product architecture
What is the fundamental difference in functionality between Rational DOORS Next Generation and Rational DOORS?
DOORS Next Generation is a fully web based Requirements Management tool offering based within your existing web browser. This web based approach allows organizations to have a far cheaper deployment process reducing the cost of deployment and allowing organizations to roll out new releases of functionality on a more frequent basis.
When storage services are moved onto the Jazz platform, constraints can be removed because we can redesign internal data structures to provide more flexibility in addressing the needs customers have today and are likely to have in the future. For example, Rational DOORS Next Generation is being designed to employ reuse concepts. In addition, a commercial database will be used to bring more flexible and standardized operational procedures to Rational DOORS administrators.
One example of controlled requirements reuse
We envision requirements engineers using Rational DOORS Next Generation to create specifications in which requirements are displayed in multiple places simultaneously. At the same time, those engineers will retain full control over the project scope as the requirements are updated. This reuse can also be used with project-wide type systems. Projects teams will be able to use common data types to efficiently and consistently define requirements.
How can Rational DOORS Next Generation be introduced to existing large-scale deployments of DOORS?
Rational DOORS has more users using the tool for Requirements Management than any other and this is for a reason. IBM is not forcing its customers to move from their existing deployments of DOORS and furthermore we are continuing to invest in new releases of DOORS 9.x.
Customers wishing to take the opportunity of the additional benefits that DOORS Next Generation offer will naturally need to plan their rollout carefully. Rational DOORS Next Generation and Rational DOORS 9 offer built-in support for the bidirectional exchange of requirements information by using a technology called ReqIF. ReqIF is the evolution of the Requirements Interchange Format that is now governed by the OMG. With ReqIF, diverse teams in different organizations, and that use different requirements management tools, can work on shared specifications and then construct a consistent view of a solution. DOORS 9.5+ and Rational DOORS Next Generation are being developed by a common development team that understands the cross-communication needs between the tools and can use this knowledge to harmonize dispersed data types from DOORS 9 into a more efficient project level type system in DOORS Next Generation.
When should I be interested in using Rational DOORS Next Generation?
In direct answer, Rational DOORS Next Generation is ready for deployment and we have customers already up and running with live programs.
Customers make significant investments in the data that they put into Rational DOORS and the processes that they build around that data. Protecting those investments is one of our key objectives. Based on customer feedback we do not expect customers to perform on mass data migration of a database but to have a more controlled project by project approach. Data can be migrated using ReqIF (see here). Customers wishing to have a team start to use DOORS Next Generation while still having information in DOORS 9 can link requirements in both databases (using OSLC) while still being able to display trace columns in each tool.
Teams that use the Rational DOORS extension language (DXL) have additional considerations before they move to Rational DOORS Next Generation. It is the intention of IBM to provide customers with a product which can be configured to support organizations needs rather than require them to write scripts. DOORS Next Generation already provides capabilities which remove the need for some of the DXL scripts in DOORS 9 today. Project wide data types shared over different modules are one example of this in practice. For those projects where scripting cannot be avoided we plan to offer support for JavaScript within a future release. Over time we expect to offer migration aides for DXL to JavaScript but would hope that many existing scripts are simply not needed. From the initial reaction of OSLC we are finding many integrations can be produced using server side services and don’t require scripting at all. DOORS Next Generation offers the same OSLC support as DOORS 9 currently supports with the addition of RRDI for reporting on metrics.
Summary
We are building Rational DOORS Next Generation in such a way that a project or enterprise can decide over time when they should move their working environment from Rational DOORS 9. DOORS 9 will continue to have investment and releases of new functionality.
If you have projects that might benefit from the functionality in Rational DOORS Next Generation we recommend you take a look at further information on Jazz.net, try the product with free evaluation licenses downloaded from Jazz.net or if you are an existing DOORS user download your full license for DOORS Next Generation from the license key center.
Notes
- You can learn more about the relationships between Rational DOORS 9, Rational DOORS Next Generation, and Rational Requirements Composer here
- Find out more about Rational DOORS Next Generation here
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