Telelogic Doors integration with Aris.

Hello Nelson,

such an integration is always possible but there is not out-of-the-box integration to doors so far.

I see principally three way to implement such an integration:

1. ARIS offers an API to access the database content and a scripting mechanism to work with this API. So you can write a script that exports/imports data from/to ARIS using either an API from Doors or creating a file format that could be imported by Doors.

2. You could simply use the ARIS AML import/export and create a xsl transformation to convert our file format to the Doors format and vice versa.

3. With ARIS 7.1 we introduced a new transformation technology (part of the ARIS Process Automation Architect) that can be used to transform between ARIS diagrams and external xml files.

But these alternatives cover only technical aspects, the effort differences are too high between them. My experience is, that the most effort has to be done before the concrete implementation starts, because you have to decide what use cases have to be supported (only one time data transfer, round trip support, life cycle management over both tools, ...) and you have to define the methodical mapping between ARIS and Doors elements.

I would propose you contact our Customized Solutions team, they are very experienced to implement such integrations and should be able to support you.

Regards

Uwe

Hi Nelson,

of course this is possible. You can choose either a group or a diagram in the explorer tree and start the "export as xml file" from the context menu. The created output is AML, our special ARIS xml format. The dtd of the format can be found at the installation disc.

Regards

Uwe

Hi Nelson,

there is a diagram called Requirements tree that allows you to define requirement hierarchies.

There are also additional attributes that you can find in the requirements management attribute group.

You can assign a requirement allocation diagram to each. The allocation diagram can be used to set the requirement into relation to other artifacts from your architecture (services, application systems, responsible persons, etc).

A differentiation between different kinds of requirements (function, non functional, etc) is not reflected by special object types or symbols. In order to group your requirements you could

• use user defined symbols
• group your requirements by defining a grouping requirement.

Hope that helps...

Regards

Jens

Can ARIS interface with microsoft Team System VSTS? Functional requirements are being developed in microsoft Team System VSTS and we want to see if we can automate this process with existing developed business model?

Thanks,

Bill

Hello Bill,

such an interface is not part of the ARIS products. But in many projects such tool integrations have been established successfully. In most cases the ARIS scripting capabilities or the AML import/export (together with a xsl transformation) are used, but also our new transformation technology might now be used. You have to define a methodical mapping between the tools (ARIS and MS team system VSTS) and then to implement the import into ARIS. It should be not a too big thing to export functional requirements from MS team system VSTS (depending from their export capabilities) and to import them into ARIS and connect with the business processes. A first version should not take more than 15 - 20 days, but this is only a gut feeling, based on experienced ARIS users.

Best regards

Uwe

Hi,

I want only to brainstorm:

How could we use ARIS and a REQM tool (DOORS) together?

for example I don't know if it is effective to use ARIS as a Project Architecture tool (for each project, based om EA master models and objects, identify the processes to be tagged, the functionalities, org units, products, applications, create their instances and manage them through the project lifecycle and then consolidate with EA masterd objects after project ... ) and identify the required functional requirements. of course it can be made (ARIS allows everything :o), but I don't think that it is a happy way.

It is the same as it should be innefective to use ARIS as a CMDB tool, althought it can be of course implemented (i know a company that has ARIS as the front-end presentation model connected with their CMDB and each night they update the data about the infrastructure objects and in ARIS they reflects the status of the object - the question is if it is not better to have in the CMDB tool).

So, I want to have my EA master objects (processes, business functions, applications, business objects, products, orgUnits  ... ) in ARIS and their variants or instances maybe in a DB tool (or in DOORS) and any (analysis/aggregation) results back in ARIS (Enterprise Archi Analysis data for example)

we have yearly in the bank 50+ big projects (plus many small projects, small enhancements and change requests) and in each project at least we touch about 220 (average) till 1232 (max) EA artifacts ... and it is very innefective to handle through our CASE/BPM/EA tool (Sparx) and we use excels to handle project Architecture(s) impacts on EA through business requirements ...

Do you see please another scenarios? has you good experiences using ARIS also for projects - project Archi impacts analysis and mgmt?

Thank you for really any hint ...

Erik Iglesias.

Hi Erik,

I should admit that your post touches a bunch of different scenarios at the same time:

• solution architectures and their alignment with domain\enterprise-wide architectures
• configuration management (or perhaps also asset management)
• requirements management

Definitely ARIS is not a configuration management tool for physical IT instrastructure of a company, however on a small scale ARIS could serve the objective and be cheaper than a dedicated CMDB tool, especially if you take into account further use-cases and roles which are supported by a single deployment of the ARIS technology.

ARIS is not a requirements management tool like DOORS, however DOORS is not an Enterprise Architecture Management System like ARIS. An interface between both (at least on Excel base) makes sense and can help to align architectural elements, programs\projects, identified requirements in ARIS with their detailed elaboration and status in DOORS.

Most of our EA clients are using ARIS to support projects. This is a very pragmatic approach, not  an approach of an ivory-tower metamodel endless perfection. :-) Projects range from infrastructure consolidation to applocation portfolio harmonization to business-driven solution development. Certainly such projects are going thru an architecture board which uses outputs from ARIS to analyze the proposed solution architecture in terms of alignment with the roadmap as well as with defined standards. Project Start Architecture certainly can be build in ARIS, which will seriously simplify such an assessment.

As a client example we have a bank with over 250 project per year which is using ARIS for this very purpose.

Frankly saying I wonder how you manage to assess the impact using Excel, so would be glad if you can share with me this best practice. :-)

/Konstantin

Hello Hans,

there is no standard functionality to integrate ARIS and DOORS. We had several discussions about that topic and one result was, that the methodical scope of the integration (and also the needed underlying conventions) are really customer specific. Even if we would provide a standard mapping a lot of work has to be done to adapt it to the needs of a concrete customer project. Also there were only a very few request into that direction over the last years. Based on these two facts we could not decide to build such an integration as part of our standard products.

I'm sure that there are projects working with such an implemented interface, but I cannot give you concrete examples. Maybe someone else in the community can support here.

Best regards

Uwe

Hello Uwe,

thank you for the reply. It is good and bad or bad and good. 

It is bad, because I might have to solve this problem which does not frighten me so much. It is good because it relieves me from the consideration that I might not have searched enough.

It is also good, because I have already committed myself in saying that in does not come "out of the box". Basically, I assumed it because of the reasons you mentioned.

But I actually got a comment, "maybe there is a tool that does it on a push button basis!"

Maybe, I can replace DOORS by SAP Solution Manager capabilities, but before Version 7.1 that seemed to be not feasible.

Now, I am also interested in the architecture component of ARIS, but I will first check for this by getting general information before I state problems here:)

Best regards

Hans

Hi,

Not sure how did i miss this post when I was doing it back in 2009. I did it for one of the big project in a bank (my last job). 

As mentioned in the post it is organizational requirement specific solution. I was fortunate that I had little knowledge in DOORS Scripting also (Although I should admit I used lot of DOORS team help. You definitely need to work with DOORS team to come up with a solution). It was basically a script (around 1k line of code)running every night to upload information from DOORS and giving upload result and a usage report of the DOORS requirement in ARIS process model so that DOORS team can upload in DOORS. You can run it multiple times in aday. But our requirement of running every night was sufficient. The solution did has some intelligence if there is a failure etc. I beleive it is now running for last almost 3 years every night. Consider around not more than 10 times a year you have to manually check if there is a failure. Most of the time the problem was with the DOORS team extract  format. Apart from that it was mostly stable.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Abhijit Das

Hello Hans,

when discussing DOORS with IBM/Telelogic consultants in Nov 2011 they came up with a customized interface solution. A product brief, only in German, can be found here:

http://www.ibm.com/Search/?q=DOORIS+aris+integration&v=17&en=utf&lang=de&cc=de

(sic, their nickname is DOORIS)

or the doc deep link: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/emea/de/rational/neu/RAS14092-DEDE-00.pdf

Hope this helps, Martin