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An artifact is one of many kinds of tangible by-products produced during the development of software. Some artifacts models, requirements and design documents] help describe the function, architecture, and design of software. Other artifacts are concerned with the process of development itself—such as project plans, business cases, and risk assessments.
The term artifact in connection with software development is largely associated with specific development methods or processes e.g., Unified Process. This usage of the term may have originated with those methods.
Build tools often refer to source code compiled for testing as an artifact, because the executable is necessary to carrying out the testing plan. Without the executable to test, the testing plan artifact is limited to non-execution based testing. In non-execution based testing, the artifacts are the walkthroughs, inspections and correctness proofs. On the other hand, execution based testing requires at minimum two artifacts: a test suite and the executable. Artifact occasionally may refer to the released code or released executable produced, but more commonly an artifact is the byproduct of software development rather than the product itself. Open source code libraries often contain a testing harness to allow contributors to ensure their changes do not cause regression bugs in the code library.
Much of what are considered artifacts is software documentation.