Introduction

Each release of CAST AIP provides a default Assessment Model which contains the standard set of Quality Rules and measures that are used to measure and qualify your Applications. This Assessment Model can be viewed in the CAST Management Studio > Assessment Models view - see image below (click to enlarge). While this default Assessment Model is satisfactory for most use cases, it is possible to customize it to your own requirements.

For example, you could create an Assessment Model that triggers only the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) Quality Rules (click to enlarge):

Creating a custom Assessment Model

Customization is performed in the CAST Management Studio application:

Preparation

Create new Assessment Model

CAST recommends that you create a new Assessment Model and then make your customizations using this:

The New Assessment Model option will create an Assessment Model based on the default Assessment Model provided with CAST AIP plus any Assessment Model fragments originating from any extensions you may have installed.

Expert mode

Ensure you are working in Expert mode:

Deactivating existing items

If you don't need specific Quality Rules, measures etc. (i.e your Application does not contain target certain technologies), then you can deactivate them to prevent them from being triggered during an analysis/snapshot. This is designed to be a temporary action, i.e. it can be changed easily and quickly between snapshots:

Note that deactivating a Business or Technical Criterion will also deactivate any child items such as Quality Rules or measures.

Customizing top level items

If you do not want to use any of the existing default Business or Technical Criteria in the new Assessment Model, you can create your own:

For each top level item you create you will need to define (amongst other things):

Grade Contributors (Business Criteria only) - any Technical Criteria that will contribute to the Business Criterion
Grade Impactors (Business and Technical Criteria) - the child items (Technical Criteria, Quality Rules, Quality Distributions or Quality Measures) that contribute to the selected item
For Business Criteria choose the type > Health Factor or Rule Compliance

You can also customize existing top level items by removing or adding child items (in the example below the default Changeability Business Criterion (Health Factor) is being edited):