Rational DOORS, which is in version 9, has been the market-leading RM solution for many years. It provides a wide range of RM capabilities and a rich scripting language. Rational DOORS also integrates with other products and has a large, active community of users. This product has been proven on both the largest programs and projects and on smaller teams.
Rational DOORS Next Generation is a new RM collaboration platform with a rich client and web client. This product includes capabilities such as visual requirements definition, work item and test integration, and planning. It runs as an application on the Rational Jazz™ integration server and can be installed and integrated with the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) and more broadly, the Rational solution for systems and software engineering. The capabilities of Rational DOORS Next Generation are improving significantly release-to-release, but this release does not yet have all the major capabilities of Rational DOORS, so teams using Rational DOORS should consider their current needs and practices when evaluating Rational DOORS Next Generation.
Both products provide traceability to manage requirements across the development lifecycle, support requirements-driven development and testing, and link to design and modeling resources. In addition, the products can be used together. For example, requirements and related resources in one product can link to the other. Modules and objects that are exported from Rational DOORS can be imported into Rational DOORS Next Generation.
To watch a video that compares IBM Rational DOORS and IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation, go to Introduction to IBM Rational DOORS NG for v9.x Users.
Rational DOORS is for teams in complex, high-compliance, systems engineering programs. It provides mature capabilities, such as structured requirements specification modules, roundtrip data import and export, electronic signatures, baselines, and customizable requirements views with multi-level traceability. For offline work or printing, views can be exported to document formats or spreadsheets. Rational DOORS also supports requirements change management that is driven by a process in a change management tool. This product can be scaled to large development projects with tens of thousands of objects or hundreds of concurrent users.
In addition to the RM capabilities of the Rational DOORS client and built-in database, the optional Rational DOORS Web Access component supports review and common editing tasks in a web browser. Rational DOORS Web Access is ideal for distributed teams that do not require the full capabilities of the Rational DOORS client.
Rational DOORS Next Generation uses the capabilities of Jazz Team Server to support team collaboration through dashboards, reviews, and comments. Users, projects, data types, artifact types, attributes, and tags have a common administration. These common services and type systems help project teams consistently define and manage requirements.
In lifecycle projects in the Rational solution for CLM, project areas, team members, and processes are managed across associated applications: Requirements Management (RM), Change and Configuration Management (CCM), Quality Management (QM), and Design Management. Because a commercial database is used, system and project administrators can follow flexible and standardized operational procedures.
The web client for Rational DOORS Next Generation provides tools to define requirements in rich-text documents and visual representations in business process diagrams, use-case diagrams, storyboards, user interface sketches, and screen flows. Requirement artifacts can be organized and reused in views, collections, and modules. The rich client includes a module editor for creating specifications that have a hierarchical structure and views that are like the features in Rational DOORS. Both clients support traceability links to related requirements artifacts and across lifecycle applications to development plans, work items, test plans, test cases, designs, and models.
For document generation, Rational DOORS supports the capabilities of IBM Rational Reporting for Document Generation and IBM Rational Publishing Engine. Rational DOORS Next Generation also supports those capabilities and includes the capabilities of IBM Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence to create customizable, dashboard-based graphical reports.
For a high-level comparison of the client and server architecture in both tools, see the next diagram.
For more information about Rational DOORS, see the Rational DOORS Information Center. Also, see the article on Jazz.net Which IBM Rational requirements management tool is best for your teams?.
For information about the development of Rational DOORS Next Generation as a Jazz.net project, see these websites: https://jazz.net/products/rational-doors and https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2011/10/07/new-project-doors-next-generation.