ESE Report 39: Exchanging Requirements from IBM DOORS to DOORS Next

For some time now, we have been seeing a few trends emerging across different industries. There’s hardly a technical device today which does not come with software-enabled capabilities to enhance user experience.

As those capabilities become increasingly advanced, the challenges for the software and systems engineering teams can become overwhelming. A common approach to deliver a properly working system despite the functional diversity is to break down the overall system into its subsystems. This step is called decomposition and can be repeated iteratively if needed for very large overall systems. Another trend is a decreasing vertical range of manufacture. Since the decomposition has enabled us to break down our overall system into handy components, we can simply delegate the development of these components to specialized suppliers.

At some point, however, these components need to be integrated to build our overall system. If the exchange of information with our suppliers is not working smoothly, we will run into unexpected problems. Modules delivered by different suppliers may not work together as needed.

This paper examines the technical possibilities of data exchange and the process required to achieve this.