IBM Rational DOORS Reviews

We use DOORS to document system requirements and inherit customer equirement maintain standard and conformity. It helps in traceability of requirements and restricts changes to requirements by anyone. In order to make changes to the requirements, one needs RCR (Requirements change request) which would be reviewed and approved before applying changes. It would help in impact analysis and version tracking.

It is a great tool for requirement gathering and elicitation. It brings all the business analysts in a team on the same page as everyone has the same understanding on requirements.The traceability to system requirements, customer requirement and test cases helps all teams to reference each other's work in an easier manner.

IBM DOORS has helped in keeping requirements wording and structure standard across all customer documents. It's export functionality helps in producing quality requirements with ease within short time frame. This helped in supporting multiple clients at the same time with lesser chances of errors.

• The product is less configurable in terms of Menu options. The replication of data is not as easy as excel across the rows/columns. In order to replicate, the user needs to go to each cell and make the change
• Upon losing connection to VPN/internet, DOORS can lose the content written and this requires it to be redone. The product should at least send a notification to the user about lost connections to avoid rework
• The images added in DOORS are not exported easily in word documents. They do not scale as expected

I used the tool for two years.

The software came pre-installed with the machine but DOORS upgrade took long time. It slows the machine and additional RAM is required on machines with DOORS.

Customer service is good as we got an IBM consultant to fix issues or code, but his support is limited to minor bugs. Major enhancements and bugs had to be escalated and sent to IBM which had a longer turn around time.

I have used HP Quality Center but DOORS provides better standardization and maintainability of requirements.

It was straightforward as it came pre-installed on my company machine.

It was through a vendor team. The implementation and training was smooth, but the enhancements and bug fixing took long time.

It is an expensive software but worth the spending for a larger firm which require standards across customers.

I was not offered any other option. The company has used this tool for years for requirement gathering and maintenance.

There are numerous projects that we are using with IBM Rational DOORS. They are isolated from each other and then we receive requirements from outside sources, load them into DOORS, and use them to do traceability into architectures developed in MagicDraw.

It has improved our ability to do traceability back to our initial requirements. The traceability allows us to be able to rapidly advise our sponsors.

I like being able to sort and categorize the requirements and the exporting functions.

I would recommend that fuzzy logic be added to the search capabilities. I think there is probably room to improve by offering free training.

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS for the past ten years.

IBM Rational DOORS is stable.

I think overall it is scalable and has measured up to everything we have tested it with.

I would rate technical support a six on a scale of one to ten. I have tried to contact them twice and never heard anything back.

Neutral

My initial setup and integration were more complex than I was expecting.

I believe they did the deployment in-house.

I would tell them to be very cautious about how they initially import their requirements into the product because that initial import seems to carry more weight and effect than I would have anticipated.

I would rate IBM Rational DOORS a seven out of ten.

I am using IBM Rational DOORS for managing engineering requirements.

IBM Rational DOORS has helped our organization because of the sense of configuration baseline. That is key for us. With it, we can create and freeze baselines, put them on the configuration control,  and then use it as evidence. 

What I like about DOORS is baselines, it's easy and I use the capability of multiple users. The traceability or links between different levels are very nice. Additionally, it is used by all of our suppliers, which brings us commonality.

One of the things that many people complain about is it's hard to manage attributes. For example, tables or figures. This is something that can be improved. 

The most important improvement for me right that is needed is based on textual structure type, which has been good, but there are new trends and more model-based are required. For that, it's outdated, it does not work well. It's outdated when it comes to model-based requirements

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS for approximately four years.

The stability of the solution is good. However, you can access the database remotely and when you have too many users, you see the performance reduces. I don't know what the exact threshold is to where the point that it starts affecting the efficiency. I know when there are too many people accessing the database simultaneously, it can get slow.

The scalability is good in the sense you are allowed to have many users, but performance-wise it will decrease if you have too many. However, it can scale in different ways for certain other requirements, it is very good. I have no issues. It's easy to manage.

We have hundreds of people using this solution, mostly in the engineering department.

This solution is being extensively being used in organizations.

I have not used technical support because whenever we have issues, we raise a ticket and the ticket is managed by our IT. If they need any higher-level solution they will contact the IBM Rational DOORS team.

We are using Siemens Teamcenter for the same usage as IBM Rational DOORS, but for different databases, they are not interconnected.

We have an IT department that does the implementation and all the maintenance of the solution.

My advice to others that want to use IBM Rational DOORS is you need to know what is the usage you want to give the solution. If any company wants to do something more mode-based oriented, I would not use IBM Rational DOORS. However, if you have a more textual requirement, IBM Rational DOORS is a good solution.

I rate IBM Rational DOORS a seven out of ten.

IBM Rational DOORS is used as a requirements management tool. It enables you to do full requirements development and testing.

The most valuable feature of IBM Rational DOORS is the full requirements development and testing.

It would be helpful if Microsoft provided a more user-friendly interface for updating and querying updates. Additionally, if there was a way for users to notify developers of any changes in requirements, it would allow for faster and more efficient updates to the solution's architecture. This could be in the form of a notification system that alerts developers of any changes that need to be made. Additionally, the solution is document-driven and it should be more digital.

I have used IBM Rational DOORS for approximately 20 years.

I rate the stability of IBM Rational DOORS a ten out of ten.

We have two people in the company that uses the solution.

We do not have plans to increase usage. We are moving towards a more digital environment where we are using SysML and UML to write requirements instead of text-based messages. IBM Rational DOORS should have the capability to model these requirements, but currently, the add-on they have is not effective.

While a large number of requirements may be present, managing them effectively is a separate challenge. There are various tools available for managing requirements, such as IBM Rational DOORS, but they may not always be sufficient. Effective requirements management is crucial in this field.

The field of engineering is evolving, moving away from traditional methods of management, such as using tools, such as  IBM Rational DOORS to organize and allocate textual requirements. The 2018 DOD strategy for digital engineering highlights this shift towards utilizing models rather than documents in the digital environment. However, many people are still stuck in the old ways and unaware of this change. It is important to keep in mind that the new way of doing things also involves developing architectures using the modeled requirements.

I rate the scalability of IBM Rational DOORS a ten out of ten.

I rate the support of IBM Rational DOORS a ten out of ten.

I have used Excel spreadsheets prior to using IBM Rational DOORS.

The return on investment in system engineering is difficult to quantify as it primarily involves writing clear and comprehensive requirements. While a team may be dedicated to this task, measuring the return on investment can be challenging.

IBM Rational DOORS is highly expensive.

I rate IBM Rational DOORS a nine out of ten.

The DOORS Application provides object to object traceability, with user flexibility to build their own traceability reports without requiring administrator coding in DXL, XML, java or any other scripting language. In addition, out of the box features for generating baseline to baseline redlines is efficient when reviewing changes.

The documentation of history is automated, making the generation of reports for the change review board simple. I can extract redlines using Baseline Compare between the last approved baseline, and the ‘current’ module, which collates all of this history into a single redline report making change reviews a breeze.

Clean specification generation has become more difficult under IBM’s direction, than it was under QSS or Telelogic. Since IBM acquired DOORS, there have been bugs introduced into the out of the box print capability (Ctrl+P), while they developed a complex printing solution in Rational Publishing Engine. This takes printing out of the user’s hands, and requires administrators or software developers to build templates for generating documentation which makes the job of generating a document a project in and of itself.

I have been using and administrating DOORS since 1998 in multiple different roles, including in Systems Integration, Requirements Management, as well as Engineering Tool Support team member. I've also used v4.0.4, v4.1.4, v6.0 SR1, and v8.3 for requirements management and risk management for medical device development and on-market support.

DOORS has some issues with speed when setup in an enterprise environment. However, DOORS has been the most stable product amongst our engineering tools.

We have been very successful deploying the product to users in Dallas, Chicago, Ireland, Germany and Japan.

Customer service for all of our Engineering Tools has been trending down over the last 10 years, and DOORS is no exception. However, among the biggest of players that we use including Dassault Systems, Siemens, HP, Serena, we have found IBM’s level among the best. I have had direct customer access to the DOORS development team at multiple conferences, who have been able to find resolutions for problems, and have provided enhancement requests that have been developed into the tool over the years.

Prior to DOORS, over 17 years ago, we used a custom Lotus Notes database, but it did not provide traceability or easy reporting.

DOORS is a proprietary database, and it is a simple install of a server and a client, and you are off and running. Very straightforward in the Rich Client environment. It only begins to get complex if you begin setting up integrations using the IBM CLM environment.

In-house engineering tool support team is how we evaluated, tested and deployed DOORS in our company.

The products developed in our company that started with DOORS requirements in the late 90s are now a one billion dollar annual revenue product line. My advice on requirements management in a regulated environment, is that if you try to do it cheap, rather than efficient, your products will suffer during the market phase.

We have evaluated many tools over the years, including MKS, Siemens Teamcenter Requirements solution, and none of have met the ease at which a user can create and customize their own views and traceability reports, without an administrator performing customization.

The most valuable features were the structural flexibility of the documents and ability to specify the type of link between them. It was possible to organize a group of collections within a project, a group of modules together in a collection and a group of artifacts together in a module or a variation of that. Additionally, it was easy to design links to any of the previously mentioned entities in a variety of defined relationships.

This product improved the amount and accessibility of formalized documentation surrounding business processes. It also helped bridge the gap between business and technical documentation requirements which was a priority when trying to rebuild our CRM system using vendors in several different time zones.

In the future, I would like to see a better interactive table of contents or index page that updates in or close to real-time. As the repository grows, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of all the moving parts that contribute to the system as a whole.

I used Rational DOORS for approximately nine months during 2014 on a fairly consistent basis.

The predominant issue that was encountered was connecting Rational DOORs to Rational Software Architect. Although these two products were meant to work in conjunction with each other that never came to fruition. The result was creating a workaround by saving image files that couldn’t be automatically updated and caused the database to time out as the repository grew.

I would not rate the level of customer service and technical support very highly. Response times were high and self-serve help via their website was hard to follow for non-technical users.

No previous solution was used.

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.