IBM DOORS Next Reviews

I primarily work with two IBM products based on the IBM Jazz platform: DOORS and IBM DOORS Next, commonly referred to as DNG. For architecture, I use Rhapsody several times for customers, along with Enterprise Architect from Australia instead of Rhapsody.

I provide these tools to my customers and am not using them myself. I deal with IBM DOORS Next as well, and most of the projects at the moment involve migrating many customers from Classic DOORS to IBM DOORS Next because many companies are switching from the old system to the newer system.

The Australian tool, Enterprise Architect, is from a company called Sparks, and it is not by IBM.

The power, performance, and accuracy of this tool are excellent according to all clients, even though pricing is not a point of contention. IBM DOORS Next, after successful migration, shows great satisfaction, particularly in the automotive and avionic sectors.

My experience in this regard has been positive, particularly for the automotive industry and especially for the avionic sector. In those two industries, clients are really satisfied with what the migration has demonstrated after it has been successfully completed.

It is difficult to explain my opinion on IBM DOORS Next; the usability is not as good as I expected, and it is very complex and complicated. It is not a bad tool if you understand how it works, but from the perspective of engineers who only use IBM DOORS Next approximately several times a month but not permanently, it is not very comfortable or intuitive to use.

The implementation, migration, and configuration need more user-friendly usability, perhaps through on-site guidance or intuitive use with push button functions, which might be more comfortable, because at the moment, it looks very complex, and ordinary engineers often mention that they have to work with this tool but would not choose to.

Simplifying IBM DOORS Next would not be a bad idea. From my perspective and connections with friends at IBM in Switzerland, I gain access to very good background information that helps me satisfy my clients. However, if I had not had these contacts, I might have felt lost inside the tool chain. I am really satisfied as long as I can get help, but I believe it would be a great benefit if the tool itself offered more intuitive push-button functions and similar enhancements.

The pricing of the tool itself does not actually matter because the power, performance, and accuracy of this tool are excellent, and that is not the point of contention. All clients agree that the tool is not bad, but the complexity is an issue since it creates a situation where you feel lost while working with it. The intuitive usability that we learned from Classic DOORS is simply not the same. I understand that the complexity has grown, yet I believe it would not be a bad idea if IBM considered splitting or breaking down IBM DOORS Next into two options or, better yet, developing a modular architecture that suits smaller and mid-sized projects. For larger projects with a lot of subsystems, it makes sense to use the full range of the tool, but for startups or mid-sized companies, it would be beneficial if they could select modules according to their needs.

More visible on-site automatic help would be beneficial. For instance, if you need to move something, as you use the mouse cursor, an automatic message could pop up asking what you would like to do so that you can select within that context, and it would automatically perform the task. Modern software development recognizes that this type of modifying usability makes life much easier for users. Many have mentioned that whether it is Rhapsody, DOORS, or IBM DOORS Next, the issue is they work only a few times a month and are not professionals with these tools, which leads them to contact me for assistance. It would not be a bad idea for IBM to make this tool more handy, efficient, and user-friendly since most users do not work full days or even months on these tasks and are not familiar with the complete usability.

I did not use IBM technical support; instead, my assistance comes from friendships developed over more than 25 to 26 years with developer colleagues in the US, UK, and elsewhere. I call them for guidance on what to do next.

Neutral

I have worked with a variety of solutions; I have not worked as a professional partner or certified member of IBM because I never found a need in the past. Additionally, I had some very bad experiences with IBM before DOORS came to IBM, so I am cautious and ensure I gather information that keeps my customers satisfied.

There are several modern tools that offer serious alternatives to IBM DOORS Next. One of them is Jama, and the other, which in the past was called MKS, is now under PTC, belonging to Siemens after a purchase. These two are more flexible, user-friendly, and intuitive to use, and they excel at bridging document-based engineering with UML and similar design and architecture practices, representing a much more modern approach to proper engineering these days.

The difficulty is that it is not that simple to migrate from the old DOORS system to the new one, and many clients agree that after the job is done, it is fantastic and also nice to work with, but the procedure from old to new is horrible.

I recommend this splitting for IBM DOORS Next, not for the older version.

My overall rating for this solution is 6 out of 10.

For requirement management, we are using IBM DOORS Next.

The solution has easy operation, is user-friendly, easily understood, and has better tracking for requirement management.

I am familiar with the traceability capability of IBM DOORS Next. Traceability is a beneficial feature.

We are not interested in integration with lifecycle management tools. If required, we will connect to the local India team for dashboard reporting tools or additional features.

I am not an exact user or end user, so I would need to check with my team regarding drawbacks and improvements.

We have been using IBM DOORS Next for three years.

It has been easy to install.

The product is good in terms of stability.

I do not have information about scalability and flexibility.

We are happy with the technical support from IBM. I would rate support an eight out of ten, where one is bad and ten is good.

Positive

I am not dealing with anything similar to IBM DOORS Next; this solution is good.

It has been easy to install.

The solution has easy operation with different users.

The solution is slightly high in terms of affordability.

I give eight points only because the price is a bit high, which is the only problem since I am the purchasing person, but not the technical user.

I am not the exact user, so I cannot speak from personal experience. My user is more experienced with the solution. I am a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer. I do not want to be a reference for IBM. I rate IBM DOORS Next eight out of ten.

I am using IBM DOORS Next in our system engineering processes by defining requirements according to the software development process, then switching to the next state design, and then testing. At the end, we perform the requirement coverage, and those were requirement management tools in the process.

The usability of IBM DOORS Next is very good, and the features are very good. We were able to define well-structured requirements with links, and it was similar to using a Word document. What I found very good was that we could define several groups of requirements, and we were able to see the several groups. That is a feature that I miss in some tools that we are currently using in the context of Agile.

The traceability feature in IBM DOORS Next is very good to use during the coverage analysis.

The improvement for IBM DOORS Next is related to the exportation of documents. We had to install an additional tool to export Word documents.

We needed additional tools, and the whole exploitation process was also difficult for us because we used Word templates that we integrated into the process so that IBM DOORS Next included it in the export process. That was not ideal. When I use Jira, I just need to go to the menu and click to export, and then I have all the things that I want. That is the big difference.

It depends on what you want to do. In the past, we worked in the classical way, and today we are working in Agile. In my opinion, IBM DOORS Next does not have any Agile support, and that is why for requirement analysis, IBM DOORS Next is correct, but for someone who is working in an Agile process, IBM DOORS Next is not the solution because it is not integrated into the Agile working process.

I have been using IBM DOORS Next for more than three years.

More than two people were involved in using IBM DOORS Next. The whole company, at least the development department, used the solution. Approximately 50 users were involved in using IBM DOORS Next.

It was quite easy to deploy IBM DOORS Next because we had enough support, and I am not remembering that we had any special problems.

I did not personally take part in the installation of IBM DOORS Next as I was a user.

I think the collaboration functionality in IBM DOORS Next for distributed teams is acceptable. Based on my experience, I would rate IBM DOORS Next an eight out of ten.

I use IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation as a requirement management tool for software development.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation helps reduce missed requirements, especially since we have started using it as a requirement management tool. Multiple teams within an organization can work together on the same tool and follow standard or best practices to test the benefits and results they experience from reduced defects and more standard, on-time delivery of work.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is quite scalable so that it can handle a large number of artifacts without any problems in its performance, and it also offers traceability with the other IBM tools, like IBM Engineering Workflow Management and IBM Engineering Test Management, meaning such links are already integrated into the solution.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is not a very user-friendly product. From an improvement perspective, IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation needs to be made a very user-friendly product.

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation for five years. I use the solution's latest version.

It is a stable solution. With IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation, my company has faced some downtime, which was not because of the application but due to infrastructure-related issues.

My company has not found any issues with the scalability part of the solution.

There are around 300 users of the solution in my company.

My company contacts the solution's technical support, and they are good and responsive.

The product's initial setup phase was not too difficult, so I could say that it was medium when it came to the difficulty level.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I cannot discuss the product's price since it is meant to be confidential and kept between our company and IBM.

If the product price were not reasonable enough, our company would not use IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation.

My company has not evaluated Jama Connect against IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation. My company plans to evaluate Jama Connect against IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is not that difficult to maintain, but it definitely needs a team that can continuously be involved in the maintenance part, do upgrades, and implement whatever patches are released. If there is growth in the product's user base, then there is a need to revalidate the infrastructure and see whether it is adequate because you need the tool to offer more performance, which is very important.

There is a six-member team in our company to maintain the product.

To others who plan to use the solution, I suggest that they involve experts to take care of the installation part and involve IBM from the time the product's usage starts. It is not recommended that you explore the solution by yourself.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is the master for capturing requirements. The solution does have other use cases, however, most of our customers are using DOORS as a requirement capturing software. High-level requirements or stakeholder requirements are captured mainly in DOORS.

There are many good features with DOORS. The solution has a concept of streams and baselines, as well as a concept of components. A component is a subproject inside a project.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation has the capability to extend or add extensions to the data model.

Another valuable feature would be the ease to add custom attributes and new objects with DOORS.

The user interface of IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation needs to be improved, there is a lot of scope with this. Even though there have been improvements from versions five, six and seven, the UI still has a lot of bugs. 

There is room for improvement in the APIs that they have exposed for integration. The solution relies on OSLC for integration APIs, but those APIs do not support all the capabilities.

I have been working with IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation for five years.

The solution is not very stable. The performance could improve. We generate a lot of data, causing DOORS to become sluggish with some lags in the software. The earlier version of DOORS Classic handled a large amount of data better.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation can scale up and down, but there is a lot of scope for improvement required in this regard.

Personally, I have not interacted with IBM Rational DOORS' customer service and support. We have our own support team.

The initial setup is medium in complexity. It is not straightforward. The admin console itself is a little tricky to understand within the whole licensing model and user access control.

I would rate the initial setup a four point five out of five.

From what I know of Jama Connect, Micro Focus, and Inflectra, DOORS Next Generation is the number one requirement management software. There are other product options, but I believe that DOORS is the best offer out there.

Overall, I would rate IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation an eight out of 10.

The way system engineering typically works is that your use cases are developed in what we call an MBSE, which is a model-based system engineering tool. Let's say your MBSE tool is MagicDraw. First, you would get and develop a system spec from your customer requirement specifications. Then your requirements engineers would further derive the system spec and set it up in your DOORS environment. Then your architects would start architecting and modeling from that system spec and develop use cases and logic flow diagrams. Then, as those use cases mature, they turn into performance requirements or constraints to help establish your sequence diagrams. The use cases aren't managed in DOORS, they're managed in an MBSE tool, but like I said, the use cases derive requirements that get put into DOORS.

The biggest thing is that it shows cradle to grave traceability between the initial parent requirement and the lowest level, or what we call a CID, a critical item development spec. You can establish your verification plans in DOORS, and then as you get test results, you can put them in DOORS as a link or as a pointer to where that specific test resides on a company database. Then you can also write compliance rationale and add a column for coding, like pass, fail, green, yellow, red, meets, does not meet, partially meets, or whatever scoring criteria you want to use. Like I said, the best thing about it is that it provides you that visibility of your verification, allowing you to know how close you are to your pre-production activities, prototyping, go ahead, or whatever it is.

One of the most valuable features is how you can tailor the modules.
Basically, you can generate any view you need, all in one stop. Polarion, for example, is web-based, so you have to open up a thousand models to try to get the information you want and then stitch it together yourself. Whereas in DOORS, you can create that view and see everything.

Also, I believe DOORS is the industry-leading tool to demonstrate traceability between requirements.

I would say the only additional feature would be if it had dynamic linking to other MBSE tool sets or industry-leading tools. That way you could have that link and not have to do a manual insert or translate the data to an Excel-based product and then use the Excel to load into DOORs. 

I have been working with this solution for about 15 years. I worked at British Aerospace Engineering for five years, and defense always uses DOORS. It's part of the government contract, they mandate that you use DOORS for your requirements management. I recently left British Aerospace Engineering to work for CNH Industrial. CNH Industrial uses Polarion, but I'm the lead systems engineer for all requirements, development, and management, and we're going to migrate to DOORS.

DOORS is very stable.

The solution is scalable. We're always evaluating the complexity of different projects. DOORS handles very, very small and easy projects and I've used it where we've designed entire combat vehicle fleets and it manages several thousand requirements. I've been on projects where we've had over 20,000 requirements and it managed them just fine.

I'm currently bringing this solution into my new company, but at my last company we had over a couple hundred users.

I have been with companies who tried to do it Excel-based. The tool that we currently use right now is called Polarion, it's a Siemens-based product and it's horrible.

DOORS is not the easiest to set up. It is straightforward if you're a good admin.
Once it is set up, it's very powerful and user-friendly. Just like any tool, you have to get the training in it. Even Excel and PowerPoint can be complex for a person who isn't familiar with them.

I believe we handled the deployment in-house.

I would tell people considering this solution that in my 25 years of experience within systems engineering and being heavily involved in requirements, development, sustainability and management, there's not a better tool out there. I've been a chief engineer for 20-something years and to me, DOORS is the gold standard for requirements management. 

I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten.

Neutral

I use the tool as a PLM solution. We use it for linking requirements, flexibility between requirements and test cases, third-party models, and software architecture. We link everything together—the evolution of requirements alongside test cases and generation. We use it for everything in our projects.

The solution offers good control and configuration management with global and local configurations. This allows for collaborative work and delivery of changes to different streams or configurations.

The tool's most valuable feature is displaying requirements in a tabular format. This means you can see everything laid out in columns and rows. It is more aesthetic compared to other tools. The traceability matrix helps to view things better. It comes with different linking rules. 

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation has room for improvement compared to other tools like Polaris and Jama Connect. These tools offer more flexibility and options for developers, which IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation lacks. For example, you can define your link rules in Jama Connect, but you can't do that in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

Regarding stability, there were several issues with the server being frequently down, especially in the mornings. We experienced the server being down for two or three days a month, which was not typical compared to other tools. As a result, we had to raise tickets and engage the support team to resolve the server issues. I rate its stability a six out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

It was one of the first organizations to provide a lifecycle management tool. Their support is much faster than that of other tools' support teams. They know every issue the moment you raise a ticket. People respond immediately and try to close the issue on the same day.

Positive

The tool's deployment is easy, but you need some training in it. We require specialized training that lasts about a month to fully understand the platform. The deployment process involved providing and implementing the solution for an American automotive manufacturing company in North America. Our role was to implement the solution as part of the project.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend it, particularly for organizations embarking on transformational projects that involve rapid changes. The product is particularly strong in configuration management and change management.

We use DOORS, which is a module of Rational. I've only used the DOORS product. 

I've never used the Rational Robot. I know what it does, yet I haven't used it personally.

We really use it for maintaining our requirements documents. We use it for maintaining and updating all of our requirements docs that Rational uses today. There are probably other capabilities that it does. I'm just not familiar with them. Mainly we use it for managing requirements documents so that when they do have testing, they can use those to test against.

The ability to make updates to requirements is probably a nice feature to have. It still takes some training to do. If I'm away from it for a while, since we'll do maybe one update or whatnot, or I may review them once in a while, I'll have to re-remember things. Sometimes it can be a little cumbersome since I don't use it frequently, and I have to retrain myself.

As far as maintaining our requirements so that we can have copies of them, it's good. I can print it out if necessary.

We have another person here, an engineer here, that's kind of the manager of the whole Rational tool. She probably has more experience than I do. I just use it just to be able to reference back to those documents so whenever we have updates, we can go back to those docs.

The solution is stable. 

The product can handle quite sizable documents.

It offers an improved search experience. 

It does have a tendency to condense the requirements. It kind of puts them in a tree format. Sometimes those trees are a little difficult. Unless you're used to using it daily, how it truncates everything and kind of rolls things up can be a little bit challenging. That said, I don't know if there's an easier way to do that. 

I've used the solution for years. I've used it for quite some time. 

It's pretty stable. We've been using it for a lot of years and have found that it's a pretty stable tool for us. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I haven't really used it as much as I should. We just got transitioned over to the latest tool since we were running on Windows 2008, and we had to update it to Windows 2016, which we knew had some better modules. It was last year when we transitioned over to it. I've only accessed the tool maybe once.

I've heard others say that it's better than what we had before. 

The search, for example, is good and is better than it was. The way it displays the information is better. I just don't like the way it truncates things. That said, they're large documents. We've got a lot of pages in these documents, and so it's keeping track of everything. In that sense, it scales well and makes everything easy to manage. 

I haven't dealt with technical support. If there are issues, I defer to someone else.

I have to put a client on my computer, and I just have to follow the directions. It's not as easy as just going to a SharePoint site and then just running it. However, it's not too complex. For the first time that you do it, you have to go do some special things with loading a client and all that good stuff. That said, once that's done, it's pretty much just click and play if you want to call it that. That said, the initial setup takes a little bit of time. It does take a few hours to deploy it. 

While we've likely seen some sort of ROI, I don't have any specific data related to that. 

I don't deal with the licensing of the product and therefore do not have any pricing details.

We just stepped up to the next generation of the solution maybe two years ago.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. It's been around for a while, and we've had it for a while. I do not ever recall getting off of this and going with another tool. It's been a very useful tool for us.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is a web-based tool, based on relational databases such as BP2 or MSS cloud, so it's a different approach to work with it, to work over the web. We have all functionality over the web. There's no decline for it, so it's a completely remote working tool.

We have the data on the server with a sizable use case. Now at 47 under two, it is getting better.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is easier to expand to build a backend with several servers, so you can also use it to scale up to several hundreds of users without major problems.

This solution is currently having some performance issues because they changed the data storage in the back between version 6 and version 7, so it needs some performance improvement.

The data storage is the relational database in the background, and it has changed and needs performance improvement. Performance is a very big thing that is needed when people are writing requirements. They have to wait too long for the page to return and then they don't like it. They are looking for different ways to do and complete their work. Good performance is very essential in this tool, same for DOORS Classic.

There is also a lot of possibilities to improve reporting.

I've been using this solution for six years.

This solution runs normally and is very stable. It's more in the integration with the asset tools in the Jazz platform that there can be some instability when linking different tools in the Jazz platform. If you only use this solution without integration tools, then it's quite stable.

This solution is easy to expand to different servers. It's easy to split the user load among different servers, so scalability is good.

I have experience with IBM support, working with different people as this is a different technology, but they're very good, and the help I get from them most of the time is very quick. I'm really satisfied with IBM's support on this solution.

Setting up IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is complex. You have to set up a Jazz Team Server and you have to set up the database. Depending on which tools you use, which database, which operating system: if it's Windows or Linux, etc., it sometimes requires complicated activities to install. Depending on what you install on the Jazz platform, you need the Jazz Team Server, so on the cloud, it's not really working. It's good to have a HTTP proxy in between.

It's a little bit difficult to install it. Normally, it takes half a day to complete the installation if it's a very simple installation. If it's a complex installation, it could take two to three days.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is a different approach than IBM Rational DOORS (Classic). It has the name because the plan was for it to take over the customers from DOORS Classic, but as the functionality is different and not the same as what's on DOORS Classic, both of the tools have their place in the market. It's a different kind of work and it's a different kind of functionality behind DOORS Next Generation vs DOORS Classic.

The first contact with this new DOORS solution was in 2008, but I was not working from 2008 until now, because at the beginning it was very cumbersome to work with it and I had more problems with it than the ability to work.

I've been using the latest version: 7.0.2 with the IPIX 8a, which is the latest IPIX of this version.

We have this solution on-premises. I have here some servers where the IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is installed, then the Jazz platform. We have DOORS Next Generation, then we also have to complete the Jazz platform here, where it is implemented.

My main recommendation to people looking into implementing IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation vs IBM Rational DOORS (Classic) is DOORS Next Generation.

IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is the future and it has a lot of very nice features in it. If possible, use it, but if you need specific things which you can do only in DOORS (Classic), then use the classic version. Normally, they should aim for DOORS Next Generation, as it is more future-oriented in the setup.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. It is very good, but it is not perfect, so not a ten. It is better than DOORS Classic because I know of a lot of problems when working with the Classic version for 20 years. There are all these different things that can go wrong with DOORS Classic.