Informal Requirements Discussions

As requirements evolve, it is important that all interested parties—including business users/customers, business analysts, system engineers, developers, testers, project management and operations management—can discuss the requirements, so that they can clarify their understanding and suggest improvements or changes. These discussions serve as a more flexible alternative to a formal change request process.

With DOORS® Discussions, users can open discussion topics regarding a requirement, and stakeholders can make comments about them. Each comment is stamped with the name of the contributor and the date and time that the comment was made. When discussion topics are concluded, they can be closed. The environment is open to more than just DOORS desktop clients: DOORS Web Access™ users can also join in and participate in DOORS Discussions. This capability extends the stakeholder audience so that many more users can contribute to improving requirements definition and communication.

DOORS also provides support for external links which enables requirements to be directly associated with information outside of the DOORS environment. As traceability needs to be traversed in both directions, DOORS provides support for URLs that take you directly to DOORS elements including Objects, Baselines, Modules, Folders, Projects or even the database as a whole. This combination of external links and URLs provides full support for traceability between DOORS information and information in other repositories.