Artifact meaning in software how to#
Artifact meaning in software software#

Crucial questions are how to represent and formalize the content of these artifacts and how to relate their content to support, in particular, system assurance. Each of these steps produces artifacts for documenting the development, as a basis for a specification and a design rationale, for documentation, for verification, and impact analysis of change requests. Among others, key tasks in system development are as follows: capturing, analyzing, and documenting system-level requirements, the step to functional system specifications, the step to architectures given by the decomposition of systems into subsystems with their connections and behavioral interactions.

Artifact meaning in software software#

This paper deals with the task of working out artifacts in software and system development, their representation, and the analysis and documentation of the relationships between their logical contents-herein referred to as tracing and traceability this is a richer meaning of traceability than in standards like IEEE STD 830. Not only system assurance drives a need for semantically richer relationships across various artifacts, work products, and items of information than are implied in the terms “trace and traceability” as used in current standards and textbooks. Our contribution shall foster the long overdue and too often underestimated terminological discussion on what artefacts are to provide a common ground with clearer concepts and principles for future software engineering contributions, such as the design of artefact-oriented development processes and tools. Abstraction and refinement relations between these levels allow correlating artefacts to each other and defining the notion of equivalent artefacts. The meta model defines an artefact at three levels. We further contribute a meta model that provides a description of an artefact that is independent from any underlying process. In this position paper, we provide a critical reflection upon the notion of artefact in software engineering at different levels of perception and how these relate to each other. Therefore, it is our goal that the term artefact be standardised so that researchers and practitioners have a common understanding for discussions and contributions. Other terms like documents, deliverables, or work products are used instead of the term artefact. In fact, there does not exist a common terminology.

This often leads to conceptual and formal results being grounded in a fuzzy, unclear understanding of the essential concepts involved. Despite the relevance and frequent use of the term `artefact', the exact denotation of this term is still not clear, due to a variety of different understandings of the term and to a careless negligent usage. The notion of artefacts is widely used in software development communities. Artefacts play a vital role in today's software and systems development processes.