IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation Reviews

Requirements management as part of the Jazz Platform CLM integrated tool chain. The only reason to use DNG is as a part of the IBM tool chain.

Requirements management is a key activity in any software development process, especially so in safety-conscious industries, i.e., where incorrect software can kill you, e.g., automotive, aviation, medical devices, etc. In these industries DOORS Next Generation (any requirements management tool) shouldn’t be thought of as an improvement, but more as a key tool for doing your job, like a compiler or defect tracker.

As a web tool, DNG can be difficult to use if the server is loaded or your network connection to it is saturated. Therefore, the export/import feature is important, so you can make changes offline.

The "Link by Attribute" feature is useful for making links without needing to use the web interface manually.

The reporting tool (Jazz Reporting Service) can be very powerful for producing reports and charts, but it must be admined carefully to be useful.

The problems with DNG are legion and make using the tool very frustrating.

Yes, be very careful how you load your DNG server. There are limits to the number of artifacts a server can handle.

Many organizations come to DNG after using DOORS. The IBM Jazz Platform CLM integrated tool chain is a sexy idea that provides, in theory, the holy grail: planning, defect/change management, requirements, and tests, all linking together.

I do not do back-end administration of DNG, so I cannot comment on this except to say, given the amount of problems I have encountered, it must be a complex and error-prone.

You are going to need a beefy server and a fat network pipe to it in order to make DNG and its companion tools work well for users.

Migrating from DOORS and a constellation of other tools to the IBM Jazz Platform CLM integrated tool chain seems like a no-brainer at first. I do not know a lot about the other tools in that chain, but I can tell you DNG is the weak link.

I have come to the conclusion that if you are considering migrating from DOORS to DNG, don't! Instead of spending 100s to 1000s of hours doing migrations, invest those hours in a DXL programmer to make DOORS do what it isn't doing for you now.

Support for text, rich text and graphical requirement documentation. Extensive traceability and analysis through artifact linking across requirements and other artifacts within the Jazz CLM solutions.

It gives us better transparency of required changes and better visibility for the team across life-cycle artifacts.

There's ongoing stability issues with the browser UI. Some cases of illogical restrictions on artifact views, RFEs, have been submitted to the vendor and are currently pending review by the development team.

I've used it for five years.

In certain instances of restrictive IT networks, with lack of elevated permissions for most users, deploying the RRC add-in for browsers can be a real headache, requiring multiple cycles of un-installing and reinstalling.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Very good customer support. Timely responses and updates.

Very good technical support. Timely responses and updates.

We used Legacy IBM Rational requirements management solution, RequisitePro.

It's slightly more complex than a Tomcat configuration due to a WAS and multi-server Jazz application configuration.

It was done in-house.

Definitely not the cheapest solution when it comes to licensing and at times confusing becuase of the various types offered (meaning what features and capabilities are available by type). Much more streamlined than years ago.

As a consultant, I was not part of the evaluation or decision making team. The solution was already in place.

Try staying close to out-of-the-box in the initial usage, grow into more complex configurations and usage models if possible. If committing to a complex SDLC and automated life-cycle tools, then invest in education for all users. Do not waste the investment by assuming that the solution will be utilized by all without training.

I am a consultant and this is one of the products that I use for my clients. They use DOORS Next Generation mainly for requirements management, in conjunction with other tools such as RTC for change management, and RQM for quality management. Together, these are all part of the software life cycle.

The most valuable features are the baselines and links.

It offers a bad user experience and the usability is poor. A lot of engineers do not use it, primarily for two reasons. First, it is very abstract and hard to understand. Second, the operation seems to be very complex. For example, the setting is distributed in a lot of section and it is not easy to find where to configure it.

The baseline is not as good as it is in DOORS because you can't create a baseline for a module. Rather, you can only create on for the project.

The speed of technical support needs to be improved.

The DOORS Web Access (DWA) is not stable.

I have been using this product for about four and a half years.

This is a stable product.

This solution is scalable.

IBM has a support team in Australia that I contact when I encounter a problem from the end-users and I cannot solve it. I begin by submitting the issue to the technical support team through the website.

The problem with technical support is that they are very slow, sometimes taking between two and three months to resolve an issue.

The configuration involves customizing attributes and the deployment is not easy.

The price of this solution is very high, and it increases year after year.

I did not personally use another similar solution prior to DOORS Next Generation. However, another person in the company did use a different requirements management product.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to adopt it. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It provides us with integration throughout the complete product development process.

With it, we have easy collaboration between several development teams such as design, development, and testing.

• Import/export
• Stability

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

There were some issues.

No issues encountered.

No previous solution was used.

It was easy.

We did it in-house.

Project realization has been carried out much faster.

Use workgroup licenses for smaller environments.

No because this is the defacto standard in the automotive industry.

Plan the training and usage properly.