Modernizing Software & Processes

Migrating from IBM DOORS: Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch

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In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Migrating from IBM DOORS: Learn Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Migrating from IBM® DOORS®: Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch

As a modern alternative to traditional legacy platforms like IBM DOORS, Jama Connect® enables digital transformation with a more efficient and user-friendly approach to managing risk and compliance. And although the benefits are innumerable, some organizations hesitate to migrate to a modern platform because they believe it’s a painful, slow process.

You will hear directly from one of our customers, Rockwell Automation, about why they decided to migrate from IBM DOORS and how they were able to successfully move to Jama Connect.

In this session, the Rockwell Automation team answered the following questions, and more:

  • Why was now the right time to switch tools?
  • How easy was it to switch environments while preserving IP?
  • How did the Jama Software® team assist you in making the migration process as smooth as possible?
  • What are the drivers for continued and expanded use of Jama Connect?
  • What are the key benefits you have realized since the migration?

BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT ABOUT MIGRATING FROM IBM DOORS

Sheila King: Rockwell has some business units that have functional safety products with the 61508, and although it’s not widely used at Rockwell, teams have solved their traceability and requirements management at the business unit level using Classic DOORS. Other teams were using homegrown requirements tools and traceability, including Doxygen, and yet other teams were using Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and doing the manual brute force way of doing traceability and requirements. But then when the security landscape changed and we realized the vulnerabilities of industrial automation, the 62443 cyber security specification was invented and we decided that we needed to use it, so we needed a site certification and in the process we adopted the IBM CLM product with the DOORS Next Gen RTC for planning and RQM for test management.

Mario Maldari: What led you to consider making a switch away from the tools that you were using and why was that change needed?

King: We were already in the throes of adopting the CLM DNG tools and developing our product cycle in order to meet the 62443 certification, and we decided in that process that we really needed to up our game. We needed better planning tools for our test integration and continuous integration and delivery, and we needed better tools for requirements management. That included the ability to move data widely between products because that’s real life and in the current tools, the DOORS Next Generation (sometimes called DNG or DOORS NG) tools, we needed to use the ReqIF, which was really an administrative thing as opposed to people being able to move their own data. We also had the solution for DOORS NG and RQM and RTC and we hired a third party or we contracted a third party vendor to manage that and we decided we needed a better integration for that, for our vendor. For the tools themselves, we needed variant and configuration management and native real-time traceability.

RELATED: IEC 61508 Overview: The Complete Guide for Functional Safety in Industrial Manufacturing

Maldari: Can we spend a few minutes looking at the primary considerations you have for selecting Jama Connect as opposed to DOORS Next Generation?

King: Yeah. We actually created a grassroots working group to evaluate tools and we evaluated several. Our top two were of course Jama [Connect] and Helix. The tiebreakers were this, Jama Connect had functional safety-ready certification and anybody who goes through functional safety knows how much value that is for your audit. We needed a strong review center and Jama [Connect] has that. We needed baselines in order to be able to not have to use SAP for saving our documents. We like the rational database and the ability to configure different item types. We not only use Jama Connect for our requirements, but we use it for our threat models and our fault models, and we also liked a lot the structure, the permission structure that allows you to specify all the way down to requirement if you need to, how you’re going to protect your data in the tools. And with our fault and models or design for security and threat models, that is our business risk or business restricted setting.

Maldari: Thank you. We know the value of an organization’s environment is their data. You spend a lot of money buying tools and maintaining tools, but the real value is the data that you have inside of those tools. Can you share some of the concerns Rockwell had going into the migration?

King: First of all, we were going to having all our data in the cloud. And so we had our CISO team get involved in that and they did an evaluation because not only were we now putting requirements in the cloud, we were putting our source in the cloud with Git. We were putting our planning, our tests in the clouds, our anomalies in the cloud, some kind of scary stuff to have in the cloud, and so we had a CISO audit and they decided that it was very safe to do that. Secondly, when it comes to actually keeping our data safe, the truth is we asked Jama Connect to explain to us how they were going to keep it safe and they convinced us that they could, and so they’ll tell you how they kept our data safe.

Maldari: Maybe that’s a good transition to the next question. This is just a discussion around were there any specific steps you took to protect the data and IP?

King: Because we had such a short window for moving all the content over, we made backups as it was in our current tools and then moved them into the tools and we used the ReqIFs, the collections and all that stuff from DNG and just about every other way you can export data out of that and back it all up. And then once we moved it into Jama Connect, actually just handed it over to the Jama Software team and they imported it and then we migrated it and “Jama-tized” the data once we had it inside.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Maldari: Maybe we could bring Preston into this as well. Can you and Preston share some of the details around the migration approach?

Preston Mitchell: Yes. I’ll go ahead and let Sheila start and then I’ll jump in after.

King: So just as I mentioned, we had six months to do it, so we had three phases that we started with. We worked with our stakeholders to identify all the content to be migrated, and then we again had the extremely tight window we elected, like I mentioned, to adopt, to bring it over into Jama Connect as is.

Mitchell: Thanks, Sheila. Yeah, the slide that’s being presented right now basically illustrates the standard migration approach utilized by the Jama Connect team and our partners. Every migration is going to have unique elements, needs, but in the case of Rockwell’s migration, this template married very well. As Sheila was taking care of the planning, we transitioned really seamlessly into analysis and discovery. During the discovery and proof of concept stages. We did come across a few issues, very common in migrations, so we required some customized tool development, but once we had validated the integration tools and the approach, the final stages was fairly straightforward process.

Sheila was generating all of the extracts from the legacy systems and she would transfer those to the Jama Software team and then we would load them into Jama Connect. And as Sheila said, in some cases we go through a cleaning of the data prior to migration, but again, given the short window for this migration, we just elected to bring all the data over from DOORS Next Gen, which in some cases some of the modules had over 170 attributes, which we were able to consolidate and clean down quite a bit later. But again, with a short timeframe, we just elected to bring everything in as is cleaning up afterwards and Jama Connect because they were coming up against a pretty critical deadline where they were losing access to their DOORS instance.

Maldari: That sounds pretty comprehensive. Sheila, now that you’re at the other end, how would you rate your experience around migration and user your satisfaction?

King: Oh, well, the team was just great. They worked really hard to integrate and migrate our data. Anytime we ran into an issue, we got the software group and I keep forgetting the name of the team, I just call them the software group because that’s what we are, software. Anyway, but they’d come in and they would write some code to add to their data exchange to manage the data that was coming out of the tools, and it just worked really very well. The Classic DOORS group had a hundred and I can’t remember, seven fields, and we were able to talk them down into just, I think it’s 10 now.

WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Migrating from IBM® DOORS®: Learn Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch

Mario Maldari
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