IBM DOORS Reviews

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 used DOORS to elicit and gather user needs and then document them. We would then document these needs with diagrams and pictures that could be used to implement products and tests. We also used it for traceability purposes.

System engineers, software requirements engineers, software development engineers, software manual test engineers, software automated test engineers, software DevOps teams — these were the people who mainly used this solution.

We went from an ad hoc Word document to a table-driven model that could be reviewed without submitting any documents. That was a big help.

This solution is the Cadillac of similar solutions. I liked that we could export to Excel and Word. We could also link to other off-shelf tools.

Compared to other tools that I have used over the past 20 years, DOORS is the best of the best. It's expensive. It's a heavy-duty tool. 

It would be nice if it could be scaled-down so that it could be installed and implemented without much learning or training. That would also make the price more attractive.

You have to pay the premium price, but if you're a startup company or a medical device company, you'll want to create traceability immediately. It's actually simpler to use it straight out-of-box. It requires a lot of administrative work. The initial setup is not very easy — at least on-premise. A lot of training is required. It should be easier to use. 

I began using this solution in 2000. I used it at my old company; I don't use it anymore.

This solution was very stable. It took our staff a while to transition from previous technology to DOORS. Otherwise, the tool itself was very stable. In the end, people saw the difference. Especially when it came to traceability from the system requirements to the product requirements, to the software requirements.

The technical support was very good. Better than Microsoft.

An implementer did the initial installation. Based on what I heard, it's not easy to install. I don't want to say it was complex, but it wasn't very easy either. It's not just like installing  Word or Microsoft Office — it wasn't that easy.

We were a big organization complete with different teams. There were some disagreements on how the tool should be set up, how the traceability should be set up, etc. These discussions delayed the delivery or the final implementation. Otherwise, it could have been set up quickly. A lot of customers made it much harder. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

IBM DOOR is the best tool you can purchase; it's the Cadillac of all tools. Don't be scared of its vast amount of features. Use only what you need, and don't panic about the complexity or the completeness of the tool

There are numerous projects that we are using with IBM Rational DOORS. They are isolated from each other and then we receive requirements from outside sources, load them into DOORS, and use them to do traceability into architectures developed in MagicDraw.

It has improved our ability to do traceability back to our initial requirements. The traceability allows us to be able to rapidly advise our sponsors.

I like being able to sort and categorize the requirements and the exporting functions.

I would recommend that fuzzy logic be added to the search capabilities. I think there is probably room to improve by offering free training.

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS for the past ten years.

IBM Rational DOORS is stable.

I think overall it is scalable and has measured up to everything we have tested it with.

I would rate technical support a six on a scale of one to ten. I have tried to contact them twice and never heard anything back.

Neutral

My initial setup and integration were more complex than I was expecting.

I believe they did the deployment in-house.

I would tell them to be very cautious about how they initially import their requirements into the product because that initial import seems to carry more weight and effect than I would have anticipated.

I would rate IBM Rational DOORS a seven out of ten.

I use DOORS to support my customers, who are heavy users of the tool. I try to figure out what's wrong whenever they have some issues. For example, if they need some help, I use the tool to recreate my customers' environments and work with it to find solutions for them. About 10 people in my company do the same thing as me.

When you install DOORS locally, you have the flexibility to do what you want with the solution. You can add functionality and do many things that you can't do with other tools or do well enough to satisfy your users' requirements. For example, you can save linked versions when you do baselines, and then I can handle linked changes between different baselines. You can't do this with other tools, or it's hard to do.

The web application DOORS Web Access doesn't have the same functionality as the standard client, so it's not a real substitute. For example, web Access only provides writing requirements, but you can't do much more with it. If you want to change multiple attributes or something like that, it's better to use the standard client. I would also like to see some improvements in the reporting.

I've been using Rational DOORS off and on since 2001.

DOORS is stable. I have seldom have problems with it.

DOORS is a file-based data storage system, so it isn't that useful for large user communities. If they want to work with the standard client, it is crucial to have a solid connection between the client and the database software because there's a lot of communication back and forth, so the scalability is not so great. Some of my customers have installations with upwards of 100 clients. 

IBM support for DOORS is helpful and quick. You get a real solution in a short time most of the time.

Setting up DOORS is easy, and I can handle it by myself. The initial installation takes around an hour, but the total deployment depends on your environment. However, you can handle it with a remote install, and installing the client itself takes only a few minutes. 

I rate IBM Rational DOORS eight out of 10. 

I am using IBM Rational DOORS for managing engineering requirements.

IBM Rational DOORS has helped our organization because of the sense of configuration baseline. That is key for us. With it, we can create and freeze baselines, put them on the configuration control,  and then use it as evidence. 

What I like about DOORS is baselines, it's easy and I use the capability of multiple users. The traceability or links between different levels are very nice. Additionally, it is used by all of our suppliers, which brings us commonality.

One of the things that many people complain about is it's hard to manage attributes. For example, tables or figures. This is something that can be improved. 

The most important improvement for me right that is needed is based on textual structure type, which has been good, but there are new trends and more model-based are required. For that, it's outdated, it does not work well. It's outdated when it comes to model-based requirements

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS for approximately four years.

The stability of the solution is good. However, you can access the database remotely and when you have too many users, you see the performance reduces. I don't know what the exact threshold is to where the point that it starts affecting the efficiency. I know when there are too many people accessing the database simultaneously, it can get slow.

The scalability is good in the sense you are allowed to have many users, but performance-wise it will decrease if you have too many. However, it can scale in different ways for certain other requirements, it is very good. I have no issues. It's easy to manage.

We have hundreds of people using this solution, mostly in the engineering department.

This solution is being extensively being used in organizations.

I have not used technical support because whenever we have issues, we raise a ticket and the ticket is managed by our IT. If they need any higher-level solution they will contact the IBM Rational DOORS team.

We are using Siemens Teamcenter for the same usage as IBM Rational DOORS, but for different databases, they are not interconnected.

We have an IT department that does the implementation and all the maintenance of the solution.

My advice to others that want to use IBM Rational DOORS is you need to know what is the usage you want to give the solution. If any company wants to do something more mode-based oriented, I would not use IBM Rational DOORS. However, if you have a more textual requirement, IBM Rational DOORS is a good solution.

I rate IBM Rational DOORS a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

I run my own engineering office in Switzerland for training companies on a freelance basis. I have used the most recent version for several projects.

This solution is very simple to use.

I really like the customization that can be done using the DOORS Extension Language (DXL). I have developed a lot of tools and it is quite nice. For example, I have a tool that I wrote that can perform a trace analysis for automatic reporting. It only works on classic DOORS because it would have to be reprogrammed in JavaScript or another language.

The UML editing and reporting features are good.

There are problems with the communication between DOORS and Microsoft Office. It doesn't matter which version of MS Office is used. When trying to communicate between Excel and DOORS or Word and DOORS and vice versa, problems arise. I would like to expect a more professional application here. A tool to gradually import scripts into DOORS Next Generation (DXL to Java) would be very helpful. Merging classic DOORS with next-generation DOORS using a web client would be a great idea.

I would like to see a much more professional way to generate documents.

A tool to import scripts, step-by-step into DOORS Next Generation would be very helpful.

The merging of classic DOORS with Next Generation DOORs using a web client would be a great idea. 

I have been using IBM Rational DOORS since 1999, version 0.1.

I have never had any problems with DOORS for any of my clients. It runs fine.

I have worked on smaller projects in the past and everything has worked fine, including the requirements and visibility. My clients have been happy and this has caused them to grow by purchasing additional licenses.

That said, this solution does not scale as well as I thought it would, so improvements could be made with respect to scalability.

Before using this solution I did everything in Microsoft Word.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I have done everything myself over the years.

I have been using classic DOORS version 9.6.1.11 and I was interested in switching to IBM DOORS Next Generation, but it is not as easy as I thought. The complexity is quite different and it is not very user-friendly. You used to have your own client and database, but now that it is mixed with the web, it doesn't make sense for me to use it.

Unfortunately, I think that DOORS was a nice tool and it is a pity that it has been ruined by IBM. The technical support is a mess and it is not the quality from the past.

I still really enjoy working with this tool. Even though it has been taken over by IBM, it is something that I have to live with.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.