The elicitation and management of requirements become more and more important and highly specialized as well as customizable tools are being used. IBM Rational Doors is nowadays a wide-spread and often used tool for managing the vast amount of requirements gathered throughout building complex systems. By investing much effort in creating a huge range of requirements, specification is more relevant in order to use this knowledge in later development phases. Working on requirements in other tools than the original one and, particularly, automating their processing is critical for the improvement of the productivity of development teams. To achieve this goal, it is vital to retrieve information from Doors database and, then, to provide this information to engineers and system engineers in a way they can make use of it. For example, the requirements could be mapped to test models being processed by respective test tools and where test engineers can derive new test requirements or test objectives.

The ModelBus® Adapter for IBM Rational Doors allows to extract requirements and to store them in the ModelBus® repository. There, they can be analyzed with specific tools and traceability links can be established. Those requirements can also be transformed into different formats like the SysML requirements type. Alternatively, the ReqIF requirements format can be used. The inclusion of Doors into a ModeBus® based development process can be realized in different ways which utilizes the user interface, the requirements analysis (via scripts) or the requirements database capabilities of Doors.