Software Artifact Metamodel

Software Artifacts are key elements during software development processes as they represent most of the information used to create a software system. Therefore, they should be thoroughly represented fostering the organization of their internal information. This work presents a Metamodel for Software Artifacts aiming at providing a new and structured way to represent artifact content, other than current sections hierarchy. Our work defines an extension to UML/MOF and SPEM meta-models by means of layers such as: the Definition Layer to represent basic concepts of artifacts parts and relationships; the Process Use Layer is devoted to represent artifacts used in an specific software process and; the Project Layer represents the artifacts with real data. We also present artifacts from SCRUM and RUP to evaluate our approach.