Document requirements you impose on artifacts. Artifacts are created by processes defined and used by the team. This includes assemblies created by the build process, source code artifacts or reports.
The intention of this document type is to describe properties of classes of artifacts as well as concrete artifacts. Artifacts are the products of processes and therefore are often abstract descriptions.
For instance, if the system allows to integrate plugins, an artifact document may describe what qualities those plugin artifacts have to provide in order to be integrated into the system successfully.
Properties
The document type artifact provides the following properties:
Type
Organize artifacts by their type.
Repository
The location the artifact is stored when not in use.
This may be a reference to the location of the artifact (or family of artifacts) for download from an artifact server.
Sections
Description
A description of the purpose of the artifact and any related information.
Properties
A description of the properties of an artifact.These are usually constraints the artifact has to meet.
The description may refer to tests that describe how to test the quality of a given property.
Note that this doctype is not intended to document configuration properties. These will be documented with the component document.
Processes
Reference the processes that use or produce the artifact.
Subordinate Artifacts
List of artifacts that are part of this artifact. For instance, the main artifact may be a bundle of smaller artifacts.
Notes
These are internal notes that are usually not exported and only visible to team members with write access.
But this is not a safe place to store sensible information. It is just a convenience for the reader to not be bothered with notes stored here for the authors for later use. The security level is about suppressing the representation by a CSS style. Therefore consider this as a convenience for the reader, not as a security tool.
References
For a document the references section contains pointers to resources that prove the statements of the document.
Often these proofs are not easily distinguishable from further information. In this case you may want to skip the reference section in favour for the resource list.
Resources
The resources section provides references to further information to the topic of the document.
This may be information on the internet provided by the resource or information in the team's information systems. Anything the reader of the resource might want to know, may be listed here.
Resources
Title |
Short Description |
Artifact (UML) | Description on Wikipedia cites: "An artifact is the specification of a physical piece of information that is used or produced by a software development process, or by deployment and operation of a system." |