Artefacts play a vital role in today's software and systems development processes. The notion of artefacts is widely used in software development communities. 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. This often leads to conceptual and formal results being grounded in a fuzzy, unclear understanding of the essential concepts involved. In fact, there does not exist a common terminology. Other terms like documents, deliverables, or work products are used instead of the term artefact. Therefore, it is our goal that the term artefact be standardised so that researchers and practitioners have a common understanding for discussions and contributions. 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. We further contribute a meta model that provides a description of an artefact that is independent from any underlying process. The meta model defines an artefact at three levels. Abstraction and refinement relations between these levels allow correlating artefacts to each other and defining the notion of equivalent artefacts. 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.
The paradigm of artefact orientation has gained a lot of attention during the last years, especially in requirements engineering as the problems of neglecting artefacts and their dependencies were recognised. @cite_0 , we provided a meta model for artefact-oriented requirements engineering where artefacts define structure and content of domain-specific requirements engineering results. Our work concluded with the following definition of a requirements engineering artefact:
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Requirements Engineering (RE) processes are highly volatile due to dependencies on customers' capabilities or used process models, both complicating a standardised RE process. A promising solution is given by artefactorientation that emphasises the results rather than dictating a strict development process. At such a basis one is able to incorporate domain-specific methods for producing artefacts without having to take into account the variability of process definitions. Although artefacts are known to support customisable development processes, there still is no common agreement about the structure and semantics of artefact-based methodologies. In this paper we discuss different interpretations of the term artefact considering aspects like process integration capabilities and necessities within individual project environments. We contribute a meta model for artefact-orientation that is inferred from two RE models elaborated within industrial cooperation projects of our research group. We conclude with a discussion of performed case studies and ongoing work. [Background:] Nowadays, industries are facing the problem that the Requirements Engineering (RE) process is highly volatile, since it depends on project influences from the customer's domain or from process models used. Artefact-based approaches promise to provide guidance in the creation of consistent artefacts in volatile project environments, because these approaches concentrate on the artefacts and their dependencies, instead of prescribing processes. Yet missing, however, is empirical evidence on the advantages of applying artefact-based RE approaches in real projects. [Aim:] We developed a customisable artefact-based RE approach for the domain of business information systems. Our goal is to investigate the advantages and limitations of applying this customisable approach in an industrial context. [Method:] We conduct a case study with our artefact-based RE approach and its customisation procedure. For this, we apply it at a software development project at Siemens following the steps of the customisation procedure. We assess our approach in direct comparison with the previously used RE approach considering possible improvements in the process and in the quality of the produced artefacts. [Results:] We show that our approach is flexible enough to respond to the individual needs in the analysed project environment. Although the approach is not rated to be more productive, we find an improvement in the syntactic and the semantic quality of the created artefacts. [Conclusions:] We close a gap in the RE literature by giving empirical evidence on the advantages of artefact orientation in RE in an industrial setting. This article presents a model for projects that have to adhere to Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order for their results to be aligned with the broader organization. The model features project artifacts (i.e. deliverables such as Software Architecture Documents), their mutual relationships, their relationship with EA, and the processes in which they are created and tested on conformance. We start with applying Activity Theory to show the crucial mediating role that artifacts have in projects and to identify and justify the new EA-related artifacts we introduce. We subsequently incorporate these findings and existing best practices in a standard systems development approach in order to create a practical model that projects can apply for EA conformance. This model features both new, dedicated EA artifacts, and well-known existing artifacts of which we describe the way they should conform to EA. Finally, two action research studies are used to empirically support the model. We explore the paradigm of artifact-centric systems from a knowledge-based perspective. We provide a semantics based on interpreted-systems to interpret a first-order temporal-epistemic language with identity in a multi-agent setting. We consider the model checking problem for this language and provide abstraction results. We isolate a natural subclass of artifact-systems for which the model checking problem is decidable. We give an upper bound on the complexity of the model checking problem.