IBM Rational DOORS Pros and Cons

This product can help improve how your organization proceeds through solution development.

We have different generations of all products. It lets us select and see unique attributes for each release or generation. You can use attributes to define a selection area to see which equipments are for the old versions and which ones are for the new versions. This inbuilt view is what I like in IBM Rational DOORS. So, for a database and a set of requirements, it will select and show unique attributes for a release or a generation.

I like the user interface with regard to creating links between requirements and tracing links to requirements.

It is very customizable and easy to scale.

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

The shell scripting is the solution's most valuable aspect.

I really like the customization that can be done using the DOORS Extension Language (DXL).

The most valuable feature is the management verification and login.

The most valuable feature for me is the ability to enter data into one table, or context, and link it across modules.

The program is very stable.

IBM should integrate some solutions they already own toenhance the utility of the product further. Specifically import and export to Office products is more difficult than it needs to be.

Complexity, performance, openness are the three areas that can be improved. The IBM architecture and specifically Jazz looks more complex. There are a lot of servers. It's quite complicated. The search capabilities lack in IBM Rational DOORS Classic for customers who have a database with a requirement of more than 25,000 records. For example, you can search easily for a module, but it's really difficult to look for keywords through the whole database because all the modules are separated into small components, which makes the search quite complex. This is something that's really annoying because when we want to make an impact analysis, we would like to analyze the product globally. It's quite difficult to manage. The fact that you can interact externally with data makes it complex. The approach is complex and doesn't work as expected. For example, when I tried to experiment with exporting some records, the tool crashed, but I couldn't find out the root cause, that is, whether it happened because of Rational Windows or lack of memory. It was just crashing. Logs weren't very clear. IBM can try to use more recent technology for different aspects and make it easy. They can also provide free integration from DOORS Classic to DOORS. Currently, all the customization in Excel is lost, which makes it very complex. It would be a feature to make new versions compatible with features in the past versions.

The user interface for the Change Proposal System could be improved.

The interface is not very user-friendly and has not evolved in a long time.

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.

The performance could be improved. It doesn't run as smoothly as it could.

There are problems with communicating between DOORS and Microsoft Office.

The problem is that because the GUI is so bad, you either have to spend a lot of money customizing the interface yourself, or a lot of money on training.

It would have been ok ten years ago, but we are used to having better tools now.

The kind of dashboard is not very convenient.