It’s taken a while, but today the wait is over. IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next 7.0 has been officially released!
As always, IBM has an overview of what’s new and noteworthy. But here are things we’d like to highlight as being significant.
Greatly improved performance
I hear that in some use cases, performance of the tool has gone up anywhere from 4x to 9x! Rumor is that Oracle DBs have shown the most improvements. This is reason alone to upgrade.
DNG has been renamed
It was not only DOORS Next Generation, but every tool has now been renamed. This was announced about a year ago by IBM. I’m still getting used to it, as are our clients. DOORS Next got the easiest adjustment.
Suspect Links Have Been Replaced With Link Validity
It’s no secret that IBM developers sometimes overcomplicate things. Suspect Links vs. Link Validity is one of those things. It took me a while to wrap my head around the concept.
Starting in 7.0, there is only Link Validity. I think this is a good thing overall and look forward to simplifying the explanation of things to my users.
This also corresponds to Link Validity being reportable in JRS! I worked really closely with IBM support to develop a report for one of my clients in 6.0.5, and it’s great to know that pain is now gone.
View columns are preserved when you switch to folders
In previous versions of the tool, you’d be in your folders view, and insert a few columns. Then you’d click a new folder, and you’d lose your columns. I worked with the DOORS Next developers on this and gave them feedback on how it should work. My feedback has been incorporated into the tool.
Yellow row highlight for new and copied artifacts cleared automatically
My users asked for this years ago, and now they have received.
Module and Collections pages no longer show the base artifacts folder
Chalk up another implementation that I’ve been asking for, for years. This is huge from a usability perspective.
Automatic type mapping for ReqIF imports
If you are involved in multiple imports/exports from ReqIF files, this should make things much smoother and less error prone.
Improved pages for empty collections and modules
Yet another one I’ll take some credit for — I’ve given DOORS Next developers feedback that it was not obvious to users how to paste an artifact into an empty module. It is now obvious.