Moreover, understanding the ramifications of adding or deleting requirements in complex designs, or ascertaining which requirements drove the creation of certain design elements, can be a daunting task.
IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® works with the Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System (DOORS®) to track and manage design requirements throughout the lifetime of a project and to navigate between the design and the requirements, in either direction, online.
The IBM Rational DOORS interface exports design information stored in Rational Rhapsody to the Rational DOORS environment. Design information can include classes, variable and type information, design diagrams, statecharts, and transitions. In Rational DOORS, the information is represented in a logical form as hierarchical requirements inside formal modules reflecting the original hierarchy of the elements in the Rational Rhapsody model. Thus, consistency is maintained between both environments.
The requirements management task is performed within Rational DOORS. Typically, Rational DOORS maintains project documents, user documents, and documentation of changes. System specification and modeling are performed within Rational Rhapsody. The model is built, however, to meet the requirements stored in Rational DOORS, which is the owner of the requirements. Prototyping and analysis done in Rational Rhapsody verify that the model is consistent with your requirements.
The interface works by sharing information between the Rational Rhapsody model and the Rational DOORS database. Requirements are traced by transferring shadow copies of Rational Rhapsody elements into a Rational DOORS formal module, where the shadows are internally linked into the Rational DOORS database.
The objective of the Rational DOORS interface is to represent a Rational Rhapsody model in a Rational DOORS module. The formal module must always contain the most current information about Rational Rhapsody model elements. Thus, you can treat a Rational Rhapsody project as a special requirements file filled with model elements. Therefore, you can link requirements to actual Rational Rhapsody model elements that fulfill those requirements. Remember that Rational DOORS is the owner of the requirements. If you need to change requirements, make them in Rational DOORS.
You can transfer information about complete Rational Rhapsody models or subsets of models into Rational DOORS. You select elements to transfer by constructing a list using the Rational Rhapsody browser. In this way, you can only update subsets of the model if it takes too long to transfer the entire model.