History of IBM Rational DOORS

Today IBM DOORS Classic and IBM DOORS Next build on 30 years of experience in requirements engineering and management. Until today’s market leadership is a long and rocky road which is outlined on this page.

1980

The beginning

When the word-processing program "MS Word" saw the light of day in the 1980s, it was not long before it was used in many different industries for electronic product documentation. However, it soon became clear that a text editor was not a suitable tool for this discipline. For example, the architecture of a text editor lacked the ability to provide documentation elements with a unique ID, or to link elements via relationships, or to integrate further properties of elements.

1980

1990

A new era for Requirements Management

The above mentioned deficits were the main reason why development on the first dedicated requirements management tool was initiated. IBM DOORS Classic was developed by a small Scottish company called Quality Systems and Software(QSS) under the direction of Dr. Richard Stevens. He was already an expert in the 1980s on the structuring of requirements, the development process of software, quality assurance, systems engineering, prototyping, etc… in short, he was way ahead of his time. Eventually he and his team set the standard for Requirements Management tools.

1990

1991

The first release

Dr. Stevens recognised that one can solve many challenges when managing requirements, by leveraging methodologies based on object oriented programming. And so requirements and specifications became objects in IBM DOORS, which were equipped with a main set of system attributes such as ID, author, text and creation date. If required, these system attributes could be extended by the user. However the real highlight was the possibility to connect objects via self defined link types. This was the real revolution in project documentation. With this technology, documentation with several levels of abstraction at once was no longer a problem. By the way, IBM DOORS is an acronym and has nothing to do with Microsoft Windows, but stands for “Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System”. It is now known as DOORS Classic.

1991

2007

A new Product

Telelogic were winning the war in terms of selling Requirements Management tools against ReqPro(the former IBM Req. Management Tool) so IBM took the decision to create a "Requirements Definition" tool instead. The vision for this new tool was to help clients understand a requirement before it was handed over to a Requirements Management tool. This lead to the first release of IBM's Rational Requirement Composer in 2007.

2007

2008

IBM Acquires Telelogic

IBM made the strategic descision to acquire Telelogic and thus also IBM DOORS Classic in 2008. However they understood that out of the functional view IBM DOORS was the market leading tool, but from an architectural perspective IBM DOORS was already a bit dusty at the time. IBM thought that the Requirement Composer was an equal but more modern product and they wanted to replace DOORS with the Req. Composer at existing customers.

2008

2014

A new Name

But things changed, IBM DOORS customers quickly put IBM in its place and made it clear that the Requirement Composer could not hold a candle to IBM DOORS in any way for classic requirements management, especially in the regulatory environment. But it was simply the modern product with the support of agile procedures up to continuous engineering. So it was decided to further develop the Requirement Composer and to make it equal to IBM DOORS. It took another 4 years until the RC had half the functionality of IBM DOORS. In the meantime the name of Requirement Composer had changed to IBM DOORS Next Generation.

2014

2018

Marketleader 2.0

It took 4 more years of development until IBM Doors Next Generation grew into a market-leading solution. It includes all the important features from the point of view of the classic Requirements Engineering and is equal to IBM DOORS in this respect, but with a modern architecture and operating philosophy. Beyond IBM DOORS, it supports modern engineering approaches like continuous engineering. And with Global Configuration it supports one of the most sophisticated concepts for variant management. Finally, there is the support of OSLC for seamless integration into complete development processes beyond tool boundaries. The tool boundaries become blurred for any Tool wich has OSLC support especially the IBM Jazz products ETM, EWM, LQE and the Model Manager. Techniques like rich Mouse Overs allow bi-directional visualisation of linked data from other tools from within the currently used tool.