Observations & Limitations

Common observations that can impact the migration are:

• Current versions versus Baselines. The current product is focused on migrating the current DOORS content and not specific baselines. A future enhancement targets the ability to use a baseline.
• No updates of migrations are currently performed. Once doing a migration of a component the application is not intended to provide an update This has been done for a specific customer, but is workflow dependent so it has not been generically exposed.
• All (non-deleted) objects are migrated. There is no current use of views to filter contents but has been considered.
• Most artifact types are supported, however types such as user are not currently supported other then using String migrations.
• OLEs only supported in Object Text.
• Table Migration. Table migration is focused on simple DOORS Tables. Tables are converted to HTML tables and contents are put in cells. (Future enhancement is targeted to enable cell contents be unique objects embedded in a HTML table to preserve cell attributes)
• WMF to PNG files. Conversion from WMF to PNG involves the usage of an external library. On rare cases the conversions are not perfect. They may require a secondary manual migration. These are very rare as well as have found no way to predict these occurrences.
• DOORS Next Indexer. The DOORS Next Indexer plays a role when adding requirements to a module. If the migration toolkit observes an issue it will introduce a time delay to enable recovery. This will introduce a recovery in almost all instance.
• DOORS Next Authentication Timeout. For very large migrations it is possible for DOORS Next to have a timeout on the connection. This is often due to specific IT imposed constraints. If this is discovered review the IT related rules and we can discuss options. As always, smaller migration units can be helpful.
• DOORS Application Connection. We have occasionally observed DOORS database connections that can be inconsistent. While the migration toolkit is typically run in a headless mode for DOORS, for these unstable environments we can run an active DOORS client to manage these behaviors.
• Logging is verbose. The console log was originally intended for identifying active migrations and developer debug. There is a need for additional user documentation to read the logging.
• Migrations are permissive in execution. With the knowledge that there are variances of content to be migrated, the tool approaches migrations in a permissive mode to continue on when issues are identified. This is to provide more details to any failures. It is recommended that the migration tool user review warnings for potential issues.