Upgraded Blogging Software
I just upgraded the blogging software that runs this site and activated a new feature or two. If you run across any bugs, please notify us. We plan on updating the site much more in…
Requirements Management
Requirements Management
Posts about Requirements Management from the Baselines blog.
TPE discussion
Over at the IBM forums, I asked for some help with Telelogic Publishing Engine. I got a response that drew some feelings out of me. The thread can be found here. I wanted to draw…
Carts Before Horses
I have just started supporting a new client. We’ll call this client Client B. Client B did a pilot of DOORS, then a few months later hired a some consultants a month or so before…
White Papers Galore
For those of you who couldn’t attend the US 2007 UGC conference, I thought I would pass along some information that was provided to those who did. Telelogic has posted the white papers from this…
DOORS Is Not Access — Part II
In my last entry I explained the concept of a public database. DOORS is a public database. Access is semi-public, as an Access developer can take steps to expose or hide the database from the users, where Oracle is usually intended to completely backend all data. Users don’t really go into an Oracle database and poke around.
This isn’t true for DOORS. When DOORS is used as anything other than a repository, users can usually see more than they absolutely need to. This makes DOORS different from other databases.
Let me illustrate my point with a story.
DOORS Is Not Access – Part I
It is my sincere hope that one day, someone who has just been tasked to administer DOORS for their company and who knows nothing about DOORS will come across this entry and think a little bit before jumping in head first.
Merriam-Webster defines a database as “a usually large collection of data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval.” In this sense, DOORS is a database. There is a DOORS server, with organized data that can be accessed by clients.
But just because DOORS is a database, that does not mean that it’s just like every other database. And I’m not talking about the difference between, say, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Or even Access and Oracle. Yes, Access and Oracle are vastly different, but all of the database servers/tools listed above have one thing in common: most of the time, the customers of the data they house never see the structure of the database.
