IBM DOORS Reviews

The traceability matrix along with the linking of software design with requirements. We are also using it for test management, so it provides bi-directional linking between requirements, design, and test cases.

Previously we were not using any requirements management tools, or maintaining different types of requirements (i.e. customer, system, software, test cases) in our process defined templates. It gets a bit tricky for organizations divided over time zones if you're not using any proper management tools like DOORS. It helps us to standardize the way our globally distributed teams are now collaborating and managing the different artifacts.

The Import and Export feature. Additional templates and options should be made available, and it should be more intuitive along with giving users more options for control. Also, I believe it should give more options for database support instead of supporting default databases that different companies are using for productions. This would mean users will be at ease if maintaining different databases for different production activities.

I have been working on this for almost three and a half years in parallel to other IBM Rational tools.

There were some issues during the import and export using the GUI, and although scripting works well, not all users are accustomed to using DXL scripts.

Not really, but sometimes it crashes when running DXL scripts that have a number of errors. In that case it’s not possible to rule out the cause of trouble.

The solution is quite adaptable to encapsulate the growing needs of organizations in terms of growth, new functionalities, and enhancement.

I have worked in the past with one of IBM Rational DOORS partner companies, so overall they are quite supportive, and at a par depending upon the complexity of the rising issue.

8.5/10 - sometimes if you forget to mention the level of complexity they become little at ease replying to your mail, but overall it’s good to have this kind of support.

No, not any kind of requirements management solution. We were managing requirements in the form of our own Microsoft Word defined templates. Management of requirements for our globally distributed teams in a centralized location was a prime driving force for the change.

It's simple to setup the complete environment. Linking with external applications is also friendly. We are using Rational Directory Server for our user management and Rational Change for change management, so the integration configuration was somewhat easy without much trouble.

We did an In-house deployment and configuration, with own local ICT and Tools and Methodologies engineer.

Pricing is on the higher side because of multiple users who want to make use of the great functionality of tools.

Single tool licensing is good, but again it's costly, and with respect to extensions like DWA, DNG, and others, it becomes even more critical for companies who do not have high end budgets.

It’s a good choice to invest money in, and will definitely prove to be value for money, even more if it's not utilized to the best possible extent. Proper planning on board will definitely prove to be beneficial.

It handles large-scale requirements analyses including traceability and impact, but in addition also has its own accessible scripting language, DOORS Extension Language (DXL), which allows users to tailor the tool to suit their more specific needs and processes. Extensions built through DXL have offered a much greater ability to tailor Rational DOORS for a variety of specific processes and needs.

I use it to support a variety of customers. Using it, I have been able to quickly and accurately perform holistic analyses of data. I am able to create a traceability and impact analysis report of a set of 20+ documents in minutes, and then use the tool to help verify that the data is accurate.

"Out of the box" Rational DOORS, in most cases, will not have many desired features for specific needs. DXL allows a user to customize it to fit many of those specific needs, but such extensions require lots of training and time. Therefore, while the rooms for improvement can be filled, it requires a trained expert user - or users - to access the full Rational DOORS functionality. It is not friendly to new users, and has a steep learning curve.

I’ve used it for one year.

I have not had any performance issues between a Rational DOORS database of 100 requirements vs. one with 10,000+, beyond an expected increase in processing time for dealing with more objects. Even with 100 to 10,000 requirements, processing time for common tasks only goes from a few seconds to a few minutes.

In most cases with clients, initial set-up involved importing a document corpus into Rational DOORS, then verifying that it was imported successfully. Regardless of the format of the original documents, I have not had trouble configuring documents then importing them into Rational DOORS, which supports imports of CSV, ReqIF, rich and plain text, FrameMaker files, and several others. Rational DOORS 9.6 also supports importing documents/spreadsheets to update current data.

It is process agnostic, i.e. it can be tailored to serve any life-cycle process flow. It also integrates with the largest number of software and systems engineering tools in the marketplace.

It supports the capture, management and development of requirements, thereby reducing defects at the earliest stage of a project.

The underlying database engine is proprietary, therefore integration with other tools can only be achieved via the Rational DOORS DXL API. The newer version, Rational DOORS Next Generation, will fix that.

I started using it at v5.2.

Organizations that do not have a requirements engineering process in place are generally in for a big surprise when they deploy Rational DOORS, since it does not implement any particular process or methodology.

Partitions are one complex feature of Rational DOORS that are not particularly robust and is generally avoided, unless the project database is administered by a very proficient and experienced administrator.

It is based on a single, centralized database server, making multi-site exchange and collaboration somewhat challenging.

Customer service suffered everytime Rational DOORS changed its organizational structure (i.e. from QSS to Telelogic to IBM). Also, the quality of service suffered when it was outsourced to India. Since then, however, IBM has improved it considerably.

Richard Watson's team has provided Rational DOORS technical support from day one. If it could be explained, they would explain it. If it could be fixed, they fixed it.

I've not used a previous solution, but today, I'm investigating the Eclipse Requirements Management Framework (RMF) for small entities/teams that cannot afford a power tool like Rational DOORS.

Installation is straightforward. Project start-up can take some time if an organization or project does not have an institutionalized process around which they have tailored DOORS usage. Also, if tailoring requires DXL scripting, the organization or project must have the expertise available. Many projects/organizations stay away from customization for that reason. Using Rational DOORS integrations with other tools can add another layer of complexity.

I have implemented Rational DOORS projects both as an external consultant and as an in-house expert.

The best money invested on a project is always on requirements engineering, and an ROI of 10-20:1 is not uncommon.

For small teams, node-locked licenses are the least expensive by far. As the project team grows, i.e. 10+, one flex licence per five team members becomes more cost-effective.

Over time, I have tried every other ARM tool out there for various customers and kept going back to Rational DOORS.

If you do not have a resident Rational DOORS expertise, invest some up-front money to secure the assistance of one to help with deployment, tailoring and training,

We use it to manage requirements. For the defense projects, we basically do a waterfall design methodology. So, we input the customer's requirements at the top level, and we flow down through all of the design requirements and the testing requirements. We keep it all managed through DOORS.

Many of our defense customers give us the requirements in a DOOR file, so we can instantly import it. Nobody has to sit there playing with spreadsheets or anything else. In minutes, we have the requirements, and we can begin the flow down to the various levels of the design as we work on it. The thing that we like about it is the fact that it's compatible with what our defense and also space customers use.

I like the way we can simply link requirements with one another and with test descriptions and then automatically produce reports that are required to show compliance to our customers. It is a combination of requirements management and reporting that I like, but I really have very little to do with the reporting part of it. I don't know how easy or hard it is to create those reports.

One thing that I would like to see is a lower-cost version of it that we could use for smaller projects. Sometimes, we do projects for commercial customers who would benefit from something like DOORS, but it's just so expensive. It's just a monster, so a lower-cost version would be the thing that we'd like to see.

I have been using this solution on and off for about eight years.

It is incredibly stable. We've never had a problem with its stability.

In the projects we've done, we've never bumped into a limit where we needed to do anything to accommodate the project. It just works. So, we've never had to scale it.

In terms of the number of users, we're limited to about three people who use it, and they're all hardware and software engineers. 

It is being used extensively. We use it every day. We could apply it to other things. If there was a lower-cost version of it, we would probably use it more widely through our projects, so that's really more a function of the cost of the product than the usability of it. 

I didn't have any encounters with them.

DOORS is the only system we've used for this purpose. In other cases, we create massive spreadsheets that have links in them and are completely unmanageable, but they do the work.

I wasn't involved in that.

I don't personally know what the numbers are. I just know that one of the reasons we've limited it to three seats is a function of cost.

I would rate IBM Rational DOORS a 10 out of 10. The main reason is that it's what our customers use and what we've been using for many years now, and I don't see any reason to change, frankly.

I run my own engineering office in Switzerland for training companies on a freelance basis. I have used the most recent version for several projects.

This solution is very simple to use.

I really like the customization that can be done using the DOORS Extension Language (DXL). I have developed a lot of tools and it is quite nice. For example, I have a tool that I wrote that can perform a trace analysis for automatic reporting. It only works on classic DOORS because it would have to be reprogrammed in JavaScript or another language.

The UML editing and reporting features are good.

There are problems with the communication between DOORS and Microsoft Office. It doesn't matter which version of MS Office is used. When trying to communicate between Excel and DOORS or Word and DOORS and vice versa, problems arise. I would like to expect a more professional application here. A tool to gradually import scripts into DOORS Next Generation (DXL to Java) would be very helpful. Merging classic DOORS with next-generation DOORS using a web client would be a great idea.

I would like to see a much more professional way to generate documents.

A tool to import scripts, step-by-step into DOORS Next Generation would be very helpful.

The merging of classic DOORS with Next Generation DOORs using a web client would be a great idea. 

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS since 1999, version 0.1.

I have never had any problems with DOORS for any of my clients. It runs fine.

I have worked on smaller projects in the past and everything has worked fine, including the requirements and visibility. My clients have been happy and this has caused them to grow by purchasing additional licenses.

That said, this solution does not scale as well as I thought it would, so improvements could be made with respect to scalability.

Before using this solution I did everything in Microsoft Word.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I have done everything myself over the years.

I have been using classic DOORS version 9.6.1.11 and I was interested in switching to IBM DOORS Next Generation, but it is not as easy as I thought. The complexity is quite different and it is not very user-friendly. You used to have your own client and database, but now that it is mixed with the web, it doesn't make sense for me to use it.

Unfortunately, I think that DOORS was a nice tool and it is a pity that it has been ruined by IBM. The technical support is a mess and it is not the quality from the past.

I still really enjoy working with this tool. Even though it has been taken over by IBM, it is something that I have to live with.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We had a large number of requirements coming in as a federal contractor and we put them in DOORS. We did exports from that to map those requirements to what we were doing and the architecture that we were building. We did that in MagicDraw, which we attempted to integrate with DOORS.

Being able to track changes to requirements and being able to export is the solution's most valuable aspect.

Starting to use the solution is pretty straightforward. There isn't too much of a learning curve.

I found the user interface to be unintuitive. It's something they need to work on. I wouldn't say it is bad, per se. It is just like learning to write cursive.

I would push for more extensive integration with other tools since, for example, I needed it to integrate with MagicDraw. Building in that type of integration and other such integrations would be helpful for our purposes.

There could be a better structure around onboarding to get people started. It was unintuitive as to how to get started. It needs to be clear as to what the first things a user has to do in order to get going. 

There needs to be quicker access to tech support. When I have a two-minute question that takes two minutes to answer, it shouldn't take me 45 minutes and/or a few days of callbacks to get to the right technical support person. It's unnecessary and frustrating for the user.

I've been using the solution for about two and a half years so far.

I don't recall any issues with stability, at least no more issues than anything else has. It's not buggy and doesn't suffer from glitches. I can't recall it crashing or freezing. It's pretty reliable.

The solution seems pretty scalable, from what I have seen.

In our organization, we have about 25 people on the solution currently. We've extended slightly. I believe we have at least 50 licenses out there that can be used.

Technical support is okay. I would say it took a long time to get to the right person. That said, when I get to the right person, I found they were helpful. Overall, I'd say that their support could be faster and more responsive. They tend to be slow to react and hard to reach.

From my point of view, I didn't do the initial setup. However, from the moment I started using it, I found it to be straightforward. 

I'm not sure how long deployment takes.

I was not aware of anybody outside the organization coming in to handle the implementation, however, that doesn't mean that someone on the IT side didn't have that. I'm unsure if we had outside help.

I don't have much information about pricing. I do know that our organization bought more licenses than we need, however, so we can easily add more people to the solution when we need to.

Although I cannot say with certainty, I do not believe my company has a business relationship with IBM.

I do not know which version of the solution we are currently using.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. While it's largely helpful, there are just a few things, like unresponsive technical support and difficulty with the general learning curve, which could make it more user-friendly.

The DXL Library DXL script routines/algorithms and the DOORS importer.

It's saved us time, as much as 35% when compared to v9.3.03.

None as IBM have left v9.5 as the extant version and now moved it into DOORS Next Generation.

I've used Rational DOORS since 2009, and v9.56 for 18 months.

No issues encountered.

It is the most stable platform, and did not crash once unlike v9.3.03 version that we had previously.

We used it on one programme to start with, but when I left the company, we were using it on five separate programmes.

We were using IBM directly, and they were 10/10.

10/10 - IBM take real pride in their technical support activity with customers.

No we didn't, as we were under contract to use DOORS.

It installed really well, and it has a straightforward license key operation.

It was done in-house, but our engineers had guidance and support from IBM, which was excellent.

It's massive, as it's a contract requirement. DOORS v9.5 enabled us to satisfy all our customer demands with relative ease. Can't quantify the ROI in financial terms though.

DOORS rules are that you have licences per company which give access to the software according to the users who need access at a particular time. Most businesses would probably find it too expensive to have a single licence per every DOORS user.

No other solutions were looked at due to contractual requirements.

Use DOORS Next Generation or later versions of DOORS v9.X

I use Rational DOORS to define requirements during the software development process and share databases with our suppliers.

Rational DOORS' most valuable feature is that you can write any kind of requirement you want.

Rational DOORS doesn't support the agile process.

I've been using Rational DOORS for over ten years.

Rational DOORS is stable about 70-80% of the time.

Rational DOORS is easy to scale.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team.

I would give Rational DOORS a rating of nine out of ten.