IBM DOORS Reviews

I use Rational DOORS to define requirements during the software development process and share databases with our suppliers.

Rational DOORS' most valuable feature is that you can write any kind of requirement you want.

Rational DOORS doesn't support the agile process.

I've been using Rational DOORS for over ten years.

Rational DOORS is stable about 70-80% of the time.

Rational DOORS is easy to scale.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team.

I would give Rational DOORS a rating of nine out of ten.

We use DOORS for aerospace applications. I'm a systems engineer and we are customers of IBM. 

The solution uses a custom object-oriented scripting language called DOORS Extension Language or DXL. It allows you to manipulate the software to your liking. It's very customizable and can be as powerful as you want it to be. User management is pretty straightforward and I generally enjoy using the solution. As the administrator for the program, it's very quick and easy to add a user, change permissions, rights, things like that within the software.

The software is very dated and old. It's hard to get people to use it because the GUI looks like something from one of those giant Mac computers. It's not very user-friendly and can become slow very quickly, especially if you're not on site. It's been detrimental in this recent work from home era. If you have a lot of employees working from home, DOORS will operate more slowly than if they were on site. The DXL will be very slow if you write an inefficient tool and then your client will suffer. Not everything is necessarily written by IBM software engineers who know the system well and it will slow down as you put more tools and information into it. There's a tendency for garbage accumulation which is the simplest way I can put it. Processing of images needs to be improved. 

I've been using the solution for one year. 

There are a few bugs, some of which get addressed in updates, but there are still a few that you have to fix right out of the gate. 

The product is very easy to scale, in my opinion. It will slow down as you scale, but it's the best way to handle a large project in my opinion. It can chew through something big, it just might do it slowly. We have around 500 user accounts. 

IBM can sometimes be slow and convoluted. It can take in the order of two or three weeks to really resolve a problem on the IBM side. It requires an IBM account and a lot of hoops to jump through before you can get to them on the phone and get a straightforward answer.

For anyone wanting to use this solution, it's important to take the time to learn DXL. Don't take it for granted because understanding how it works will make a big difference. 

I rate the solution six out of 10. 

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.

The primary use for the product is requirements management. That is essentially prioritizing and planning product delivery.  

What I like the most is probably requirement traceability in configuration management.  

Usability and user-friendliness could definitely be improved as far as ease-of-use. The documentation could also be easier to use, I would say. Maybe, in general, they need to see things more from an end-user's perspective in their future development.  

I am not using this product at my current company, but I probably have approximately 20 years of experience using DOORS (Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System).  

DOORS is a very mature and stable product these days.   

When it comes to scalability, I think it is a little bit expensive to get more users onboard. I do not think there are practical limitations to scaling the use, it just might be costly to take on additional licenses to scale.  

We have used the product's technical support for some issues and we did have a positive experience with them. They were able to resolve the issues that we had in a reasonable amount of time.  

It is not cheap. It is expensive to onboard additional licenses.  

I would definitely recommend DOORS to people who need this kind of solution. You would probably need to have a reasonably large-sized project to use it because of the cost. But I can definitely recommend it if the need is there.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate IBM Rational DOORS as about a seven-of-ten, I reckon. What would need to be included to improve that score is probably cloud hosting.  

We had a large number of requirements coming in as a federal contractor and we put them in DOORS. We did exports from that to map those requirements to what we were doing and the architecture that we were building. We did that in MagicDraw, which we attempted to integrate with DOORS.

Being able to track changes to requirements and being able to export is the solution's most valuable aspect.

Starting to use the solution is pretty straightforward. There isn't too much of a learning curve.

I found the user interface to be unintuitive. It's something they need to work on. I wouldn't say it is bad, per se. It is just like learning to write cursive.

I would push for more extensive integration with other tools since, for example, I needed it to integrate with MagicDraw. Building in that type of integration and other such integrations would be helpful for our purposes.

There could be a better structure around onboarding to get people started. It was unintuitive as to how to get started. It needs to be clear as to what the first things a user has to do in order to get going. 

There needs to be quicker access to tech support. When I have a two-minute question that takes two minutes to answer, it shouldn't take me 45 minutes and/or a few days of callbacks to get to the right technical support person. It's unnecessary and frustrating for the user.

I've been using the solution for about two and a half years so far.

I don't recall any issues with stability, at least no more issues than anything else has. It's not buggy and doesn't suffer from glitches. I can't recall it crashing or freezing. It's pretty reliable.

The solution seems pretty scalable, from what I have seen.

In our organization, we have about 25 people on the solution currently. We've extended slightly. I believe we have at least 50 licenses out there that can be used.

Technical support is okay. I would say it took a long time to get to the right person. That said, when I get to the right person, I found they were helpful. Overall, I'd say that their support could be faster and more responsive. They tend to be slow to react and hard to reach.

From my point of view, I didn't do the initial setup. However, from the moment I started using it, I found it to be straightforward. 

I'm not sure how long deployment takes.

I was not aware of anybody outside the organization coming in to handle the implementation, however, that doesn't mean that someone on the IT side didn't have that. I'm unsure if we had outside help.

I don't have much information about pricing. I do know that our organization bought more licenses than we need, however, so we can easily add more people to the solution when we need to.

Although I cannot say with certainty, I do not believe my company has a business relationship with IBM.

I do not know which version of the solution we are currently using.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. While it's largely helpful, there are just a few things, like unresponsive technical support and difficulty with the general learning curve, which could make it more user-friendly.

We primarily use the solution for giving requirements, both mechanical and electric.

The shell scripting is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The strict requirements for synchronization of the data could be relaxed. It requires a permanent connection with good bandwidth. This means that in an environment with remote networking that you need to go through a VPN or use some kind of virtual machine in the middle. We had some issues with the disconnection of desktop software and so on. The strict requirements of time synchronization between the DOS server and the client that request you to have a permanent good connection are difficult now that we are working more remotely due to COVID.

The solution has some scalability issues.

The performance could be improved. It doesn't run as smoothly as it could.

The usability when you're doing writing tends to be similar to Windows. It's a rational style. It needs to be able to do drafting with drag and drop, copy and paste, etc. There needs to be more usability in order to help people move data, create drawings, etc. 

The solution should be able to support different formats and texts.

I have been working with this solution for seven or eight years at this point. It's been a while.

The stability of the solution was okay, aside for the disconnection issues we faced, it was largely fine.

The original version has some scalability problems. In some specific cases, we had some problems managing all of the client's licenses and digital locks. 

We currently have about 25 to 30 licenses and that covers 50 to 70 users.

We've dealt with technical support in the past, especially at the beginning. We're mostly satisfied with the level of support we've been given. Sometimes it would take a while for them to get back to us, however, the support we received always helped and we were able to resolve any issues we had.

We worked together with one of our dealers in order to handle the initial implementation. We were handling a complex environment in order to fit our requirements. Due to our needs, the implementation and initial setup was more complex than straightforward.

Deployment took us a couple of months, including having time to review everything.

We have our own internal team that handles ongoing maintenance.

We used some FirePop Integrators to assist us with the implementation.

Our organization does have some commercial agreements with IBM. We're more of a customer, however. We arent an IBM partner.

Whether this would be the correct solution for a company depends on the installation and requirements. You'll need to prepare a specific environment for the company according to how it works. Therefore, it depends on the customization requirements. If they want it related to the environment itself or not, there may be some complexity in the setup that needs to be planned for. That said, I would recommend the solution overall.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's pretty good, however, it could improve its overall performance.

We are mainly using IBM Rational DOORS for managing requirements.

IBM Rational DOORS keeps everything organized.

The most valuable feature is the verification requirements for peer reviews.

It has a user-friendly interface.

Some of the search queries could be improved. The interface needs an area to be able to type your query and actually be able to find them.

It could be more stable.

In the next release, they could scale it down a little bit and make it more stable.

I used this product up until three months ago. I have been with this company since February.

If I have left it open for too long, there are times where we experience a session timeout, and we have to stop or force-close it to restart the application.

From the time that I have been using it, it's been pretty good. Like anything that has been left open, you will experience a timeout.

IBM Rational DOORS is scalable.

We have approximately 300 users within the region.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have our computer management who instructed me to download IBM Rational DOORS.

It was simple to download and get started.

We may have used a retailer to help us with the deployment.

We are currently using IBM Rational DOORS on-premises but we are trying to migrate everything over to a Cloud service.

IBM Rational DOORS is good for privacy, it's good for the management of software requirements, and also for keeping everything organized. It does a pretty good job.

I would rate IBM Rational DOORS an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is for the development and management of requirements, traceability of requirements up and down the architecture chain, and verification.

I like the user interface with regard to creating links between requirements and tracing links to requirements.

I like the DXL Wizard, in particular, to build custom views that I save.

I am a fan of the DOORS Change Proposal System, although a lot of people where I'm working have their own homegrown system. I continue to push them to migrate to the DOORS CPS.

The user interface for the Change Proposal System could be improved. When creating a proposal it is great and I have no problem with it. On the other hand, during a review phase, when many people are trying to look at the change and decide whether to accept it or not, the user interface is not really helpful because it just shows you the specific change. What we have done over the years to accommodate this is to create a specification module where we pull the proposed change features into that view. I can then look at the changes in the context of everything around it, and we can decide whether it is the change that we really want to make.

If there were a way in the change proposal window to view the specific change in the context of the other things around it, including potentially other changes, then that would be helpful. The workaround that we have created allows us to view all of the potential changes in concert with everything that is not changing, which is ideally what the change proposal GUI should do.

One of the people that I work with has expressed interest in a process where you have to propose changes to links, rather than just create them. In this way, you can maintain traceability under some form of configuration management for them as well. Personally, in 20 years, I have never had a program where we tried to control links to that degree. We would monitor them, but never had any formal change process for links.

We are not allowed to use DOORS as our configuration management tool and instead have to use Agile PDM. This requires us to export data from DOORS and import it there. However, if DOORS were tailored a little bit better then we could use it as our CM tool and avoid using the other one altogether.

More and more companies are getting involved with model-based systems engineering (MBSE). I know that DOORS has direct interfaces with many of these tools, although I have never used any of them so I don't know how simple they are to use. That said, anything that can be done to streamline and simplify the tool-to-tool interface between DOORS and other products is a good thing. For example, it should be easy to exchange data between DOORS and MagicDraw, CORE, Genesis, and others.

We have been using DOORS for many years, since about 2000.

I have had no problem with stability and I think that it's worked very well. I have been using it for many years and from a user's perspective, other than the change in the name, it's been very stable and very consistent.

I have worked on programs that varied in size from a couple of hundred requirements up to tens of thousands of requirements in the database. It always seems to work beautifully, irrespective of the size. In this regard, I think that it scales well.

On any given day, we have potentially dozens of administrators and hundreds of users. We have facilities from Florida to New York to California and everywhere in between.

I have not personally been in contact with technical support. When I need help, I see our administrator. I know that some of our administrators in the past have worked with technical support. Also, one of our former administrators belonged to a DOORS community user forum on the internet. This was a source of information that offered ideas and provided support. 

Our in-house IT administrators are responsible for setting up and maintaining our software, including DOORS.

My advice for anybody who is implementing IBM Rational DOORS is to start using it early in the program and use it consistently. In other words, don't let people do their own thing. Instead, come up with a standard process of what you do, which attributes you can use, consistent attribute naming, and consistent standard views. This way, everybody is using the same thing.

There will always be custom things coming up later, but you need to have a core standard. For example, every program will have 10 standard views and 40 standard attributes, which enforces consistency. As you go from program to program, people can understand it. That's all part of the initial setup phase, where you make sure that everybody is doing the same thing.

One of the things that I've been a big advocate for over the years is to remove the human from the process as much as possible. For example, I have to generate a file from DOORS to put in my configuration management tool for a formal release. This is usually a Microsoft Word file. The problem comes about when people edit the file after it is generated because they want to change the formating and other such things. When this happens, there is a risk of human error. Although there are ways to minimize this, I can't eliminate it. As it is now, I have no way of taking the human out of the loop completely.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have different generations of all products. It lets us select and see unique attributes for each release or generation. You can use attributes to define a selection area to see which equipments are for the old versions and which ones are for the new versions. This inbuilt view is what I like in IBM Rational DOORS. So, for a database and a set of requirements, it will select and show unique attributes for a release or a generation.

Complexity, performance, openness are the three areas that can be improved. The IBM architecture and specifically Jazz looks more complex. There are a lot of servers. It's quite complicated. 

The search capabilities lack in IBM Rational DOORS Classic for customers who have a database with a requirement of more than 25,000 records. For example, you can search easily for a module, but it's really difficult to look for keywords through the whole database because all the modules are separated into small components, which makes the search quite complex. This is something that's really annoying because when we want to make an impact analysis, we would like to analyze the product globally.

It's quite difficult to manage. The fact that you can interact externally with data makes it complex. The approach is complex and doesn't work as expected. For example, when I tried to experiment with exporting some records, the tool crashed, but I couldn't find out the root cause, that is, whether it happened because of Rational Windows or lack of memory. It was just crashing. Logs weren't very clear. 

IBM can try to use more recent technology for different aspects and make it easy. They can also provide free integration from DOORS Classic to DOORS. Currently, all the customization in Excel is lost, which makes it very complex. It would be a feature to make new versions compatible with features in the past versions.

Actively, I would say three years and non-actively, maybe five years. I was working in the QA department, and I was reviewing and validating the main equipment with IBM Rational DOORS. So, I know the tool, but it took a bit longer before I start to work much more actively with IBM Rational DOORS.

We discovered some tech stability issues with IBM Rational DOORS Classic and did not convert to IBM. I'm not really convinced about the solution. Basically, IBM doesn't really support or doesn't want to improve IBM Rational DOORS Classic anymore. However, there are still a lot of customers who have been using this solution for years, some of them even for 13 years or so. 

I'm not sure about the support for other solutions, but the problem is that they don't really want to invest any more in IBM Rational DOORS classic. It's quite easy for a technical person to customize and do benchmarking to identify the root cause and proposed solution, but I think that IBM is not going in that direction. So, I'm not really happy. 

They are quick at replying for sure. However, I'm not really convinced about the solution, so I would expect to have a technical person who is experienced and find solutions. 

When I discovered and reported a performance issue, I got a reply that it is a well-known problem. I never saw that issue in the report. It looks like some of the bug information is not accessible to everybody.

I managed to install it without any serious or issues, so it was quite okay. I had a lot of exceptions at different moments, but I managed to find solutions on the web. 

IBM is a bit too expensive in terms of pricing. Customers are paying a lot for the license, and the price is quite high for this kind of environment. It is quite high as compared to what we can get today with other solutions. 

I am validating this solution. I still have a lot of solutions that look promising, such as Jama and Polarion. 

I'm more concerned about the effort to extract the system and to train people. In the world of requirement management, usability is really important from a UAT factor. Some other solutions have a better user interface, and they are easier to understand than IBM Rational DOORS in general. Even though I have experience in IBM Rational DOORS and I'm quite familiar with DOORS concepts, I find other solutions, such as Jama or Polarion, easier to use.

Our requirement is not for a huge database, just around 30,000 records. It's a shame that IBM Rational DOORS Classic is so slow in accessing such a small number of records. It's really new to the data architecture approach from the past, that is, from Telelogic.

In the new version, they no longer support Excel. So, we have to redo the whole configuration of the project, which takes a lot of time and energy. When I look at other solutions based on the results of the benchmark analysis, they look easier to work or install.

I'm also looking into the capability to export, and I got several issues with IBM, especially with the OSAC interface. There are some questions on the IBM website to assess whether it will really work or whether it is a limitation. Because it is not a well-defined limitation, you have to try. When you try and spend a lot of time and energy and do extra work, you find the limitations in what you can do, which makes it very slow.

In the past, IBM Rational DOORS was the best solution for me because it was the only one but today, people are not really attached to IBM Rational DOOR. They have to use it, but I'm not convinced that they're really attached to it.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten. It is complex, doesn't work as expected, and isn't easy to illustrate. I would expect IBM to have something better prepared, better integrated, and more compatible with I could do in the past.

The most valuable feature is the management verification and login.

The user interface is old and clunky and in need of some improvement. In order for DOORS to be as good as it needs to be, you have to be able to get normal people using it. The problem is that because the GUI is so bad, you either have to spend a lot of money customizing the interface yourself, or a lot of money on training. Because the users avoid it like the plague, you don't get the power out of it. You end up having specialists in the requirements world doing the work instead of using it the same way you would an easier application, such as Word.  

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS for about ten years.

This solution has always been very stable and doesn't really ever let us down. We do have Citrix problems because we are centralizing it but as a general rule, it is a solid tool. There can also be problems that are caused by other people's DXL coding, as people are modifying it to work for them. However, it is the modifications that cause the problems rather than DOORS itself. In this context, there are more self-inflicted stability problems.

I have not personally contacted technical support but the feedback that I have heard is that it is like all tech support. It is normally about relationships with the technical support people. The response time is pretty standard, being a couple of weeks. In Australia, they're 24 hours and normally pretty good in terms of responding quickly.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is that if you're looking for a relational database, then it's probably not the first place that I would go. People are going to use it because the client requires it, as in our case, rather than because you choose it. There are much better database setups out there, which are scalable for non-IT database people. The learning curve is much shallower because they're designed from the ground up to work as a database for normal people.

Overall, DOORS is old and clunky but it does what it is supposed to do. The interface hasn't changed forever because there's no drive to make it easier to use.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.