Concepts: Recommended Artifacts
The term "artifact" is used in this context instead of "document" to avoid association with the concept of a paper document.
Management and Environment Artifacts
- Vision. Describes the feature set, constraints, quality objectives, precedence, and priority.
- Business case. Describes the context (product domain, market, scope), the technical approach, the management approach (schedule, risk, objective measure of success), and the financial forecast.
- Software Development Plan. Contains the development case, but also covers staffing, schedule, risk management, and iteration management. It is often organized as a hierarchy of coordinated smaller plans (see the Management workflow). Specifies the actual process used by the project, the software engineering environment, configuration management, and metrics.
- Iteration plan. Describes the scope of an iteration: objectives, feature set, scenarios, test and demonstration plan, constraints, and quality objectives.
- Release notes. Describes the result of an iteration: configuration baseline, achievements (tests results, demos), metrics and changes.
- Deployment plans. Contents can vary widely, but can include a cutover plan from a legacy system, a training plan, a manufacturing and distribution plan, installation documentation, and maintenance or support.
- Status assessment. A snapshot of the project status on a regular basis, monthly, quarterly, or end of iteration that includes staffing and expenditure, top ten risks, technical progress (metrics history), major milestone results, defect data, action items, and their follow-through.
- Development case. Captures the tailored process for the individual project.
Engineering Artifacts
