Environments

An environment might represent a system operating at a particular time of day, or in a particular physical location. Environments encapsulate visible phenomena such as assets, tasks, personas, and attackers, as well as invisible phenomena, such as goals, vulnerabilities, and threats. Environments may be identified at any time, although these may not become apparent until carrying out contextual inquiry and observing how potential users reason about their context of use.

Adding a new environment

Environment form
  • Select the UX/Environments menu to open the Environments form, and click on the Add button to open the new Environment form.
  • Enter the name of the environment, a short code, and a description. The short-code is used to prefix requirement ids associated with an environment.
  • If this environment is to be a composite environment, i.e. encompass artifacts of other environments, then click on the Add button the environment table, and select the environment to add.
  • It is possible an artifact may appear in multiple environments within a composite environment. It is, therefore, necessary to set duplication properties for composite environments. If the maximise radio button is selected, then the maximal values associated with that artifact will be adopted. This may be the highest likelihood value for a threat, or the highest security property values for an asset. If the override radio button is selected then CAIRIS will ensure that the artifact properties are used for the overriding environment.

Note

Composite environments are an experimental feature and you may get errors when using them.