During the evolution of requirements, it is important that all relevant parties—business customers, business analysts, project managers, system engineers, developers and testers—get involved early in the development process life cycle with visibility of the requirements and the traceability relationships between them.

IBM® Rational® DOORS® Web Access helps you promote collaboration and requirements use in your development process by providing access to requirements stored in the Rational DOORS database through a Web browser. Rational DOORS Web Access is available for two types of user roles: a requirements reviewer and a requirements editor. The requirements reviewer has full access to read, analyze, and discuss requirements held in DOORS, while the editor (in addition to the reviewer capabilities) is allowed to directly add new requirements, modify existing requirements and create bi-directional traceability links in the same DOORS database.

Rational DOORS Web Access capabilities include:

• Web access to central requirements repository
• Web access to informal requirements discussions

Requirements Repository

While Rational DOORS provides a desktop client environment for systems engineers and business analysts to manage requirements and their traceability, Rational DOORS Web Access enables additional stakeholders to participate directly in the requirements process using their Web browser.

The Rational DOORS Web Access server has now extended its ability to support enterprise scale deployments, so even more users can concurrently access up-to-date requirements information from the Web.

With DOORS Web Access, users are not required to install any software on their desktop (or Internet browser): new requirements can be added to an existing requirements module, requirements descriptions (including rich text, OLE objects, and tables) can be viewed, while requirements attributes (both standard DOORS information and user-defined) and traceability links can be created and edited via the Web. With these capabilities, Rational DOORS Web Access streamlines the way additional team members, suppliers or partners can contribute and validate requirements and offers an alternative or precursor to a formal change request or review process, which can help you demonstrate compliance to internal and external standards and mitigate risk.

Rational DOORS Web Access can help improve the distribution of requirements information because it supports standard URL technology. Requirements can be sent via email and viewed in Rational DOORS Web Access or Rational DOORS rich client.

Rational DOORS Web Access offers navigation aids that can help you find your way around the requirements database. A breadcrumb trail and recent documents/favorites list help you quickly get to the right place in the requirements database. For easy cross-referencing, you can open multiple documents or view multiple sections of the same document in moveable panes within a single browser window. Requirements attributes can be viewed in columns alongside the requirements they belong to; individual requirements can be viewed from an Attribute pane. With its scalable module navigator, Rational DOORS Web Access helps you quickly locate data within the module and focus on analysis, rather than wasting time searching for information. Furthermore, project teams that are looking to extract requirements data for off-site reviews can print displayed or filtered requirements sets and their attributes.

Requirements Discussions

Rational DOORS Web Access provides requirements stakeholders with browser access to a DOORS database so that they can conveniently participate in informal requirements discussions with DOORS desktop client users. DOORS enables you to open multiple discussion topics about a requirement with multiple users submitting comments against each topic. Each comment is stamped with the name of the user who made comment and the date/time the comment was made. When discussion topics are concluded, they can be marked as closed. You can view and participate in informal requirements discussions with other DOORS Web Access and DOORS desktop client users.