IBM® Rational® DOORS® contains proven capabilities that can help increase quality and efficiency by optimizing requirements communication and collaboration. Rational DOORS, a scalable solution for managing project scope and cost, helps your projects meet business goals, satisfy customer needs, and address applicable regulations and standards.

DOORS, a leading solution for requirements management, provides:

• A collaborative requirements management environment that allows all stakeholders to actively participate in the requirements process
• The ability to manage changing requirements
• Powerful life cycle traceability to help teams align their efforts with the business needs and measure the impact that changes will have on everything from business goals to development
• Informal requirements discussions
• Scalability to address your requirements management needs
• Ability to exchange requirements data with other requirements management tools
• Test Tracking Toolkit for small-scale test environments
• Integrates with the enterprise architecture, product portfolio management, model-driven development, quality management, and change and release management solutions from IBM and third party companies.

Requirements management

As soon as teams start using IBM® Rational® DOORS®, they quickly find that the information it makes available is invaluable. From the first requirements decomposition, DOORS provides:

• Collaboration across your supply chain
• Gap analysis of unaddressed requirements
• Managing changing requirements
• Lifecycle change management
• Change proposal system

Traceability

Rational DOORS is unique in providing end-to-end traceability reports in a single view, which can help analysts and project managers prioritize development work more efficiently and predict delivery time more accurately. DOORS offers teams a complete picture of traceability from user requirements through systems and software requirements to designs, tests and implementation tasks.

DOORS also provides support for external links which enables requirements to be directly associated with information outside of the DOORS domain. As traceability needs to be traversed in both directions, DOORS provides support for standard URL technology taking you directly to DOORS elements including Objects, Baselines, Modules, Folders, Projects or even the database as a whole. For example, requirements can be sent via email and viewed in DOORS Web Access or DOORS (where DOORS is installed on users' desktops). This combination of external links and standard URLs fully supports traceability between information in DOORS and in other repositories.

Scalability

IBM® Rational® DOORS® has proven itself on some of the world's largest projects, in some cases managing millions of requirements and hundreds of thousands of traceability links in a single database. The familiar explorer-like hierarchy with multiple levels of both folders and projects means that no matter how big the database gets, it is still easy to navigate.

Test Tracking Toolkit

The ability to internally manage small numbers of test cases makes IBM® Rational® DOORS® an ideal solution for smaller testing environments. The test tracking toolkit within DOORS enables you to create links from requirements to test, so you can:

• Define manual test instructions and link them back to the original requirements
• Instigate and record the results of test runs
• Compare results from different test runs to see what has changed
• Interrogate requirements for requirements coverage and test status