Artifact Evolution Over Life Cycle

Artifact is generally used to represent cohesive information that is created and reviewed as a single entity.

In an artifact, some amount of precision in description of the final system description is represented at each stage of development. The precision is very low and representation is also high early in the life cycle process.

Eventually, precision of representation is high and everything is explained even specifies in a full detailed manner. Each state of development generally focuses on a specific artifact set. The overall state of a system will also have progressed on all sets at the end of every state or phase. It is shown in the below diagram.

• Inception Phase :
  This phase mainly focuses on requirements that are critical usually with a secondary focus on an initial view of deployment. To achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the objectives of lifecycle for project is the overriding target or goal of this phase. It also focuses on estimating potential risks, estimating the cost and schedule for the overall project.
• Elaboration Phase :
  There is a very larger depth in requirements or needs, even more breadth in the design set, and further focus on the issues of implementation and deployment during this phase. The activities of elaboration phase must be able to ensure and confirm that architecture, requirements or needs, and plans are stable enough, and sufficiently mitigation of the risks, that cost and schedule for completeness of the establishment and development can be predicted within a range that can be acceptable.
• Construction Phase :
  Design and implementation are the main and primary goal of this phase. At this phase, software that is developed newly is integrated and inserted where and whenever required. The primary goal and objectives of this phase are to minimize or reduce costs of development by optimizing resources and even avoiding unnecessary scrap, achieve high quality fastly, and even to achieve versions that are useful as fast as possible.
• Transition Phase :
  Achieving consistency and completeness of deployment set in the context of other sets is the primary goal of this phase. This phase must include some of activities like beta testing to validate system that is new, beta testing, and parallel operation that are similar or relative to a legacy system, it is replacing, etc.