Does IBM Doors support design documents?

Question

In my company we use IBM Doors (formerly Telelogic Doors) for requirement management.

We're starting now the development of a new series of applications and we were wondering if Doors would be suitable to accommodate our design documents that were previously made with simple doc files.

Basically such document hold text and some diagrams so I'm pretty sure I can put them in Doors but I don't know if it would be useful or even advisable. Any suggestions?

Can you think of advantages or disadvantages to user doors vs plain word documents? Would I be able to do something useful (like traceability between requirements and design items or sections)?

Answer 1

Yes, you can put design documents in Doors. Typically you would perform an import so that each paragraph would become a Doors object; this enables linking to specific parts of the design. You can link high-level design to low-level design or to requirements. It also makes it easy to share design documents and track changes.

The main disadvantage (the last time I used Doors at least) was that round-tripping between Doors and Word is fairly painful, so if you do this I'd recommend that Doors own the documents.

Answer 2

For some reason I am unable to add a comment to the previous post.

Round-triping between DOORS and WORD can be painful if you choose it to be. I have used DOORS 8.3 to DOORS 9.2, and we have some round-triping support that we developed. The key to this was having solid WORD templates. We didn't round-trip anything dealing with DOORS links.