I’m inheriting a project that has, until now, had all its artifacts maintained in CVS and FogBugz. There’s a ton of old and new documentation in MS Office format that needs to be reconciled.
I’ve seen some presentations on IBM Rational DOORS and think it would solve the lack of traceability across all these different documents and systems. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that I could, for example, highlight a phrase in a Word document and mark that as a requirement, then create bi-directional links between that phrase and other artifacts, such as tasks in a bug-tracking system or entries in the changelog and user guide, to show that the requirement has been satisfied.
Unfortunately, if I want to use DOORS, I would probably have to install and maintain it myself. I found an open-source product for requirements management called rmtoo, but it looks like it would require me to rewrite all the documents document into a bunch of specially-formatted text files–which, for me, defeats the whole purpose. If DOORs is overkill, are there any low-overhead alternatives to DOORS?
Update 2022: As a commenter rightly pointed out, the answer is dated due to changes in the tool ecosystem.
One of my frustrations is that there are many expensive tools (the main players are DOORS Next, Jama Connect, Codebeamer and Polarion).
For developers with a low budget, I often recommend R4J, which is a Jira Plugin. I find the installation and configuration process a little cumbersome, but other than that, it provides basic functions, especially traceability. As of this writing, it was $100/year for up to 10 people.
Original Answer
Do I understand correctly that you’re trying to trace elements in DOORS, Word, Tracker-entry, etc.? I don’t think what you saw is possible with DOORS out of the box. I think you need a tool like agosense for that, and tons of customization for adapters to the tools you need. If you really want to know, I’d talk to an IBM Sales Rep. But a DOORS-based solution will be really expensive.
It’s unclear from your description how much control you have over the tool chain. If you have full control and are looking for a cheap solution, you may want to check out something like Trac. It’s free and integrates bug tracking and Wiki (so essentially, for this to work you’d have to migrate your documentation from Office to the Wiki, and bugs from FogBugz to Trac – not sure whether your users will accept this, and it creates the same problem that rmtoo does).
Last, you could look into Requisite Pro, an IBM product that is cheaper than DOORS. It has the advantage that your requirements are managed directly in Word.
Hope this helps!