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Product Intent

Purpose

ACES Scenario Workbench is the human collaboration surface for developing and reviewing ACES scenario packs. Machine-readable ACES and pack projections remain the source of truth; the workbench makes their objects, relationships, revision history, validation results, and review conversations navigable.

An early prototype demonstrated that the combined scenario, ATLAS, evidence, and progression model is substantially more useful when presented as an interactive system than as a large YAML ledger or generated document.

Primary Users

  • Scenario authors developing ACES packs and their realization plans.
  • Technical reviewers validating semantics, mappings, evidence, and progression.
  • Client stakeholders reviewing the intended participant experience.
  • Maintainers resolving review decisions into explicit source changes.

Addressable Object Model

Every visible entity and relationship must have a stable, shareable URL. A table row may open a detail drawer for fast navigation, but it must also resolve to a real route. The initial route vocabulary is:

/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/modules/{module-id}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/techniques/{technique-id}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/tactics/{tactic-id}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/behaviors/{behavior-id}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/evidence/{evidence-id}
/scenarios/{scenario}/revisions/{revision}/mappings/{mapping-id}

Rows, chart segments, tags, ACES references, evidence identifiers, and relationship edges are navigation controls, not inert labels.

Detail Views

Each object detail view should expose, where applicable:

  • canonical identifier, type, title, and description;
  • source pack, revision, provenance, and source location;
  • inbound and outbound relationships;
  • validation state, warnings, and integrity digests;
  • current and prior revision values;
  • comments, decisions, and review activity;
  • review state such as unreviewed, accepted, needs-change, or resolved.

Comments anchor to (scenario, revision, object type, stable object id). They do not anchor to generated HTML positions or YAML line numbers. A later revision may carry a thread forward explicitly, but must not silently retarget it.

Ingestion And Revisions

A scenario-pack pipeline should produce a versioned review bundle after the pack passes its validators. The workbench ingests that bundle as an immutable revision identified by repository, commit, scenario version, and content digest.

The first implementation should support upload or API ingestion of a bundle. Git provider synchronization and pull-request automation can follow once the bundle contract is stable.

The workbench database owns collaboration state. It does not become the canonical store for ACES scenario definitions or private oracle ledgers.

Security Boundary

Review bundles may contain operator- or oracle-level material. Authentication and scenario-level authorization are required before content is returned to a client. Hiding navigation controls in the browser is not authorization. Access events and review-state changes should be auditable.

The initial roles are author, reviewer, stakeholder, and administrator. Authorization must be enforceable per scenario, not only per deployment.

Initial Implementation Slices

  1. Define and validate a versioned review-bundle schema from a sample ATLAS projection.
  2. Select the application stack and establish authenticated users and scenarios.
  3. Ingest immutable scenario revisions and render the prototype overview.
  4. Add stable detail routes for every object and relationship type.
  5. Add anchored comments, review states, and an auditable activity stream.
  6. Add revision comparison and explicit comment carry-forward.
  7. Add proposed-change export without direct or silent source mutation.

Sample Data

fixtures/sample-scenario/atlas-technique-projection.yaml is a small, neutral ATLAS technique projection used for local development and tests. It is illustrative only; a real ACES scenario pack remains the authoritative source of scenario content.