IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is an end-to-end engineering solution used to manage system requirements to design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of ALM tools for better complex-systems development.
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IBM Rational ClearQuest
Score 7.0 out of 10
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A customizable database workflow application development and production system that provides better visibility and control. IBM Rational ClearQuest is change management software that helps improve developer productivity while accommodating the methodologies, processes and tools that best fit the project and the people on the team. It provides tools and processes used to maintain control of changes while catering to the diverse needs of the developer.
While working on a complex project it is important all the needed change requests are handled in an effective manner, this tool helps us do exactly the same, it had great features to manage those change management tickets, making sure to merge the change with existing workflow, prioritize the requests centrally so there are no duplicates. Easy to collaborate across different teams and colleagues across the aisle.
Well Suited - If your project is running in waterfall model and other IBM tools are widely used for various purposes, Clear Quest is a good tool to have. It gives you seamless capability to create defeccts and query the defects for various scenarios. If you are a project manager or a test engineer trying to create defect metrics, this tool can help immensely. Less Appropriate - In this Agile world, everyone uses Jira or some other agile tracking tool. All the agile tracking tools have already built in defect tracking capabilities and can integrate with the work very well. If your project is running on agile or don't use IBM tools that much, then Clear Quest doesn't always add value.
There are a couple of areas where IBM Rational DOORS is quite strong. First, it is part of the IBM CLM solution so the artifacts developed in this module can be easily available for other functions like development and QA. They can link with their stories and test cases and team leads and managers can use traceability matrix to find out where there are gaps in coverage.
Comprehensive configuration management functionality (concept of multiple streams and global configuration) is available, which can be helpful if you need to implement configuration management scenarios for your product or project. For example, a certain version of a requirement can be linked with one story and another version of same requirement can be linked with another story. This is the unique feature which other current tools in the market don't provide.
It's highly customizable so you can configure the project areas based on your need. You can have your own requirement types, and you can define templates to speed up the process. Comprehensive review functionality is there as well.
IBM Rational ClearQuest records and workflow are highly customizable. As a result, ClearQuest implementations can be tailored to any organization's methodologies.
IBM Rational ClearQuest Integration with IBM Rational ClearCase provides traceability between work records and source code changes, expanding the SDLC scope of the toolset.
Too complex for projects or businesses that don't really need the detail. It is basically overkill.
If you are new to IBM Rational tools, it may be a medium learning curve. You'd also need lots of training from your people, since, as usual, this tool shouldn't be managed alone.
It may seem old fashion compared to Jira and the current control tools used in IT industry.
One of the downsides for us was the capabilities of the native build tools were lacking. The project management and work item tracking capabilities are great and I would recommend the tool to anyone. There is a definite learning curve with RTC as a source control system, and the streams are a concept unique to the product
Most likely as it's one of the powerful tools in the organization. We needed this tool to track all the process related documentation and also to capture signatures.
The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.
Please keep in mind that this all has to do with you you customize the user interface. It becomes very easy to house all of your requirements, but it may and can make life difficult for you if you do not think ahead of how you want the app to work and house your data
It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.
IBM has good support and knowledge base. With the wealth of information on their site and the support desk, we were able to quickly resolve issues. It is smart to build up a COE and a group that manages the software otherwise it is quick to be able to lose the knowledge as team members are assigned different duties
The established experience contained in most IBM Rational DOORS installations is only compensated by the high flexibility of Atlassian JIRA. The markets state that Jira is less expensive in the setup. There are many manufacturers that support IBM Rational DOORS to have the big tiers as their customers. Jira has problems in that growth. Jira has more features compared to IBM Rational DOORS. For example in cloud support, IBM Rational DOORS relies on improved external services while Jira abstracts in the most modern way. Jira experts have a different professional background compared to that of IBM Rational DOORS. They are indeed from different engineering generations. There is little interchange in personal and ideas.
IBM Doors could be better at document management for a higher price. If you need more complex traceabilily, Doors is the way to go. If you need less, free and simple management, a common SVN is ok for you.
RTC helps automate incident management workflow which improves our work efficiency. With the integration with Geneos and GSD, we can one click create RTC incident tickets from Geneos with most of the information copied from Geneos automatically and then link the details to GSD for privilege account management if needed.
RTC provides a holistic view on ad hoc production activities. We use RTC for production management. Whoever needs to get access to production due to non-planned activities (planned change is managed in GSD) has to raise an incident ticket or service request ticket in RTC so as to get production privilege accounts.
RTC is also being used to review and approve the usage of privilege account which help us to meet audit requirements. For example, if a user made some database change using privilege account under incident number xxx, an entry will be added in RTC and sent to account owner or production support manager to review and approve.
