Artifactsfunctions
Artifactsfunctions is a term used in software engineering to describe the coupling of artifacts—build outputs, data sets, and documentation—with functional units—functions or modules—that operate on or generate these artifacts. The concept emphasizes traceability, reproducibility, and modularity in complex software and data workflows. It is not an official standard, but appears in practice discussions, design patterns, and some research literature as a way to organize and reason about how artifacts are produced, transformed, and consumed by software functions.
Fundamental components include an artifact registry, which stores and indexes artifacts and their versions; function packaging,
In operation, artifactsfunctions relies on manifests or descriptors that declare function signatures, input and output contracts,
Challenges include the overhead of maintaining metadata, standardization across tools and platforms, security and access control
An illustrative scenario: a data science project stores a cleaned dataset as an artifact and associates it
See also: provenance, reproducible research, software packaging, artifact-centric design, and function as a service.