IBM Doors

Doors is an industrial-strength (expensive) requirements management tool which IBM acquired when it bought Telelogic. The original version of Doors focused more on storing and managing requirements than on visualising them, modelling them and so on; it was particularly suited to formal Systems Engineering and to building systems which needed formal compliance to standards etc – it had strong reporting capabilities. Nevertheless, older versions of Doors had limited (view only) web access functionality and poor integration with Microsoft Office.

However, Doors now ships with Doors Next Generation (Doors NG), which addresses many of the perceived limitations of Doors without compromising its strengths and Doors Web Access addresses that issue. Doors NG works with traditional Doors (using OSLC specifications) and comes with Doors. It adds collaboration capabilities for multi-disciplinary product development teams and a lighter-weight Requirements process (suitable, perhaps, for teams migrating from Requirements stored in documents and spreadsheets to something more effective). It provides full web-based access together with an optional rich client on the Microsoft platform. Doors NG is probably a sign of where Doors is going, towards a tool with full configuration management built in, so that different teams can work on different versions of, essentially, the same requirements at once; and local or market-specific versions of common requirements can be maintained.

Doors is bought through normal IBM channels. Doors NG is supplied with Doors, if you buy the latest Doors release. A trial version is available.

Doors is targeted particularly at (but not limited to) Systems Engineering professionals, working on high-value, regulated or safety-critical systems; defense, aerospace, health, transport and so on

Doors is a client/server application with its own database and its back-end runs on a range of Windows. UNIX and Linux servers.

IBM offers all the services, available across the globe, that one might expect to need in support of this product.

Particularly noteworthy is the OSLC community. OSLC or Open Services for Lifecycle  Collaboration, is a set of interface specifications which allows Doors to produce/consume services with, say, Rational Team Concert (an Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) solution) or, potentially, other tools supporting OSLC. 

Doors is a market leader in the formal requirements management space, so (allowing for the fact that not every developer is skilled ior experienced with using requirements management), it should not be hard to find Doors expertise. IBM supplies Door consultancy and training courses, both in the classroom and online (video); and a range of external trainers and consultants are also available to facilitate deployment of Doors in the organisation (although always remember that institutionalising reequirements management is as much a cultural/people issue as a technology one).