Foundation

Artifact-Driven Development (ADD) centers software engineering on structured, versioned knowledge. Explicit knowledge, dependencies, and validation govern implementation and coordination.

Problem and Purpose

As projects grow, tasks, tickets, documents, conversations, and code can become inconsistent. Teams then face fragmented knowledge, conflicting versions, inaccurate progress reports, unclear dependencies, missing decision history, and validation that does not cover the governing requirements.

Human developers and AI agents can repeat investigations, make conflicting assumptions, lose context, and implement incompatible contracts. This increases coordination effort, rework, and cost.

ADD provides a common knowledge baseline. Contributors record new findings through controlled changes, reuse established knowledge, coordinate work through dependencies, and validate implementation against the governing artifacts.

Contents

1. Definitions: Shared terms and their meanings.
2. Principles: Rules that guide knowledge, change, and coordination.
3. Artifact model: Artifact layout, records, identities, derived state, dependencies, versions, and the legacy layout.
4. Visual knowledge: Principles and research basis for tables, diagrams and derived views.