Getting Started: Artifacts Overview

Overview of artifact types and how to manage them

Here’s an overview of artifact types and how to manage them within the Proceve software. This video is designed to help you understand artifacts and how they work within Proceve software for both simple and complex organizational needs.

Overview of Artifacts

Definition and Types

Artifacts are the backbone of everything in our software. An artifact can be a requirement, task, test, issue, document, milestone, objective, or result. We also have special types of artifacts, which include feature requests, roadmap items, and tracking projects.

Special Artifact Types:
  • Feature Requests and Roadmap Items: Special types of artifacts that fall under requirements.
  • Projects and To-Do Items: A special type of artifacts, which fall under tasks, where projects are of large/enterprise size.
  • Tracking Projects: Projects that aggregate specific artifacts across various projects.

Common Properties of Artifacts

Parent-Child Relationships

Artifacts can have parent-child relationships, allowing for sub-artifacts within sub-artifacts, and so on. All sub-tasks have the same properties, behaviours, management capabilities, and organizational capabilities of the respective original task.

This unlimited hierarchical structure ensures of artifacts share the same properties and management capabilities.

Details

Inherited Properties

All artifacts inherit basic details such as name, summary, and description. Additional properties include stage, status, planning details, estimation, scheduling, dependencies, organization, and tracking.

Planning

Our Artifacts include planning details like sprint assignments and deadlines. This helps in tracking the scheduling and progress of each artifact.

Estimation

Proceve offers extensive estimation capabilities for all types of artifacts, allowing for detailed effort estimates for requirements, tasks, etc. Users can also apply estimates of resource allocation, costing, and more to all artifact types.

Scheduling

Our robust scheduling tool allows for users to not only schedule tasks and set deadlines, but also track the actual completion dates and durations, allowing for a comparison between planned vs actual progress.

Dependency Management

Proceve’s dependencies can be tracked between different artifact types. For example, a dependency can be between a requirement and task or test and a task, not only a task and a task.

These dependencies are tracked as well and can be displayed in multiple views, including Gantt Diagrams.

Hierarchical Organization

As mentioned above, Artifacts can be organized hierarchically. This includes the ability to add unlimited subtasks and sub-artifacts, each maintaining full properties and capabilities.

Tagging and Categorization

Artifacts can be organized using tags and categories, with hierarchical categorization allowing for detailed organization, such as differentiating between mobile UI tasks and web UI tasks.

These tags can include:

  • Hashtags
  • Grouping tags
  • Direct Tags
Tracking Projects

Proceve allows any artifact to be associated with multiple tracking projects (eg. You can link projects A, B, and E simultaneously).

This feature allows for aggregation and monitoring of items across various projects.

Collaboration and Communication

Conversations

Artifacts support threaded conversations, similar to communication tools like Teams or Slack, allowing for integrated and detailed discussions within the software.

Attachments

Artifacts can have attachments and support both manual and automatic time tracking, with detailed time entries and comprehensive timesheet capabilities.

Time Tracking

Proceve supports both manual and automatic time tracking for any artifact. Users can track time spent on writing requirements or documents, performing tasks, tests, etc. Each entry will record who entered it, when the entry was entered, who it was assigned to, and how long they worked on it.

The entries are displayed individually, but they can be aggregated up as well, and they can be displayed in timesheets for extensive time tracking capabilities.

Version History

Every artifact includes a complete version history, with each change archived and given a new version. We also built data retention policies that can be defined for managing historical records.

While we have set a default policy, companies will be able to define their own policies in the future, dependent to the respective rules and regulations.

Traceability

Traceability and Relationships

Proceve offers extensive traceability features, enabling the tracking of relationships between different artifact types and supporting complex relationship management. For example, users can link a requirement to a conversation.

Proceve software provides a robust and flexible structure for managing artifacts, ensuring that even the most complex organizational needs are met efficiently.