Today’s fast development cycles make it hard for traditional threat modeling to keep up, leaving insecure features in production or forcing developers to wait for security approval. ThreatCanvas changes that by embedding threat modeling directly into developer workflows.
Teams can now model entire epics, including all stories, features, and sub-tasks, within Jira and Azure DevOps. Security becomes part of the development process, not a separate task, so teams don’t have to change how they already work.
Explaining Epics
For context, an epic in Jira and Azure DevOps is a large piece of work that can be broken down into smaller stories, features, or tasks. It acts as a container for everything related to a particular project or initiative.
For example, a “User Registration” epic might include stories for creating the signup form, setting up email verification, and integrating with a database. Epics help teams see the bigger picture while managing the details of each story.
When applying threat modeling, epics are especially useful because security risks often span multiple stories. Modeling at the epic level ensures every feature and sub-task is included in the threat model.
A More Complete View of Risk
Threat modeling works best when it aligns with how teams organize and deliver work. Tools like Jira and Azure DevOps structure work into layers, from epics to tasks, and ThreatCanvas now maps directly to these hierarchies.
It creates threat models that accurately represent how teams plan, design, and build systems.
Jira Hierarchy
When a developer selects an Epic in Jira, ThreatCanvas ingests all related stories and sub-tasks to generate a complete threat model.
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Epic: The high-level feature or initiative, such as “User Registration.”
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Stories/Tasks: Functional units that define the feature, like “Build signup form” or “Set up email verification.”
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Sub-tasks: Implementation details and granular actions, such as “Validate email format” or “Add database constraints.”
As the threat model includes all layers, it showcases the full scope of the work.
Azure DevOps Hierarchy
Azure DevOps supports a deeper structure, and ThreatCanvas captures it fully:
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Epic: Large-scale business or technical objective, like “Payment Processing.”
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Feature: Major slices of functionality within the Epic, such as “Credit Card Handling.”
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User Stories: Specific user-focused requirements, e.g., “As a user, I can save a payment method.”
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Tasks: Implementation-level work items, like “Integrate with payment gateway API.”
Selecting an Azure DevOps Epic prompts ThreatCanvas to include each Feature, User Story, and Task beneath it.
Developers can optionally exclude items in Jira and Azure DevOps as needed, keeping the models relevant.
Developer-Led Threat Modeling
Threat modeling methodologies like Rapid Developer-Driven Threat Modeling (RaD-TM), together with ThreatCanvas, shift threat modeling from a security bottleneck into a developer-centric process, with benefits including:
1. Scale Threat Modeling Across Teams
Security teams cannot manually model every component in a fast-moving organization. Developers, however, are already closest to the system, making them the ideal owners of local threat modeling.
It also makes threat modeling quicker and more collaborative. Organizations can assess features in parallel rather than creating a security review queue. With ThreatCanvas, developers can generate threat models in minutes when they create epics, so features can reach production faster.
2. Capture Deeper Insights
Developers understand both what they are building and how it works. ThreatCanvas takes these insights to show the critical components, data flows, and trust boundaries that security teams reviewing from the outside might miss.
For example, when a developer models a “Payment Processing” epic, they already know which API calls process sensitive card data, where tokenization happens, and which third-party services are involved.
3. Stay Aligned with Security Policies
ThreatCanvas automatically includes approved security controls and compliance requirements in threat models. It has built-in risk templates and security controls that align with industry best practices.
These templates can be customized to meet organizational standards, so developers can work from approved frameworks rather than starting from scratch. Security teams maintain governance, while developers get immediate mitigation guidance.
Security at the Speed of Development
Threat modeling no longer has to be slow and disconnected from development work. ThreatCanvas lets teams generate, update, and maintain threat models as part of their everyday workflow. Its direct integration with Jira and Azure DevOps makes it even easier.
Models stay accurate as features change, and developers can focus on meaningful design and mitigation decisions rather than on manually creating diagrams.
