Artifact (UML)
An artifact (Engl. Artifact ) is a model element in the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a modeling language for software and other systems. It is used in the distribution diagram and component diagram.
An artifact represents a result of a work process. Examples of such results are files with source code as a result of a software development process or a text document as a result of the definition of requirements for a system.
An artifact is represented graphically like a class , but also with the keyword or the stereotype «artifact»
(see figure on the right). UML2 defines a number of additional keywords for certain types of artifacts:
-
«script»
stands for a script file that a computer can interpret -
«document»
stands for a document -
«executable»
stands for an executable file -
«file»
stands for an unspecified file -
«library»
stands for a library file -
«source»
stands for a file with source text