Fixed Artifacts

In Effective Analysis, artifacts are predefined element types used to describe organizations, problem domains, and solutions.

Artifacts that describe concrete solutions are divided into analytical and design. Analytical artifacts represent elements like requirements, use cases, or business rules, whereas design artifacts describe specific solution components. These include system components (systems, modules, UI elements), behavioral artifacts (functions, interfaces, or services), data elements (data files, tables), or outputs produced by the system (documents, reports).

The following example shows how various artifacts describe different aspects of a solution and how they come together to form a complete picture of the system:

The main idea behind documenting with a predefined set of artifacts is unification. A unified collection of artifacts used by all team members ensures everyone uses the same terminology and produces consistent outputs. Artifacts can then share the same set of attributes, be visualized similarly, and allow relationships between them to be tracked. This significantly improves readability and overall analysis effectiveness.

For more details on the motivation and benefits of artifacts, refer to this chapter.

Application of Artifacts

The decision of which artifacts to use and how detailed they should be depends on the project, the development team, and the software development process. Teams working on large enterprise systems within a formal environment—with complex relationships between development teams—will likely create an artifact for every use case, screen, or service to keep development manageable. On the other hand, small or agile teams might not create artifacts for every single part of the solution, opting instead for sketches and notes that are just enough for developers to understand what they are supposed to build.

However, the examples above apply only to documentation created for development purposes. The situation changes when documentation is created to describe a solution after its release. In this case, regardless of the development process used, the post-release documentation should be built using fixed artifacts so that it is unified across systems and projects, and remains easy to read.

Artifact Instances

Throughout this text, the term artifact is sometimes replaced with artifact instance or simply instance. An instance is to an artifact what a specific car model is to a car. A Ford Mondeo is an instance of a car. Similarly, SCR Client Detail is an instance of the Screen artifact. Very often, these terms are interchangeable. If they are not, the context will always make it clear whether we mean the general concept of artifacts or a concrete instance.