Environment Fields

What it’s for: A description of this environment — its purpose, characteristics, and role in the solution delivery.
What to include:
- What this environment is used for.
- Who has access and under what conditions.
- Any notable characteristics — e.g. data restrictions, scale differences from Production, or specific configuration.
Examples:
- "Development environment used by the internal engineering team. Shared environment with synthetic data only. Deployed to Azure UK South. Accessible via VPN."
- "Production environment serving live customer traffic. Hosted on Azure UK South with geo-redundancy to UK West. Governed by the change management policy — all deployments require a change request."
- "User Acceptance Testing environment. Configured to mirror Production scale. Used by the business acceptance team and third-party integration partners for pre-go-live validation."

Relationship	What to link
Contains Technology	Technologies running in this environment (e.g. the specific versions of runtimes, databases, platforms deployed here)
Contains Application	Applications deployed to this environment
Contains Service	Backend services running in this environment
Contains API	APIs deployed and accessible in this environment
Contains Stream	Event streams and message queues operating in this environment
Contains Data Store	Data stores hosted in this environment
Contains Infrastructure Environment	Child infrastructure environments — use this for hierarchical decomposition (e.g. a Production environment containing region-specific infrastructure environments)

Relationship	What to link
Uses Deployability	The deployment mechanism for this environment — the CI/CD pipeline, IaC tooling, or release process used to deploy into it

Relationship	What to link
Has Task	Tasks related to completing or updating the environment specification
Has Acceptance Criteria	Business acceptance criteria for this environment
Has Implementation Acceptance Criteria	Technical criteria for verifying the environment is correctly set up and configured
Has FAQ	Frequently asked questions about this environment

Relationship	What to link
Has Risk	Risks associated with this environment (e.g. single-region deployment risk, access control gaps, data residency risk)
Has Assumption	Assumptions made about this environment (e.g. assumed hosting platform, assumed access controls)
Has Issue	Known issues affecting this environment

Relationship	What to link
Implements Business Reference	Standards, policies, or regulatory documents that govern this environment (e.g. change management policy, security baseline, data residency requirements)