  Artefacts play a vital role in software and systems development processes.
Other terms like documents, deliverables, or work products are widely used in
software development communities instead of the term artefact. In the
following, we use the term `artefact' including all these other terms. Despite
its relevance, the exact denotation of the term `artefact' is still not clear
due to a variety of different understandings of the term and to a careless
negligent usage. This often leads to approaches being grounded in a fuzzy,
unclear understanding of the essential concepts involved. In fact, there does
not exist a common terminology. Therefore, it is our goal that the term
artefact be standardised so that researchers and practitioners have a common
understanding for discussions and contributions. In this position paper, we
provide a positioning and critical reflection upon the notion of artefact in
software engineering at different levels of perception and how these relate to
each other. We further contribute a meta model that provides a description of
an artefact that is independent from any underlying process model. This meta
model defines artefacts at three levels. Abstraction and refinement relations
between these levels allow correlating artefacts to each other and defining the
notion of related, refined, and equivalent artefacts. Our contribution shall
foster the long overdue and too often underestimated terminological discussion
on what artefacts are to provide a common ground with clearer concepts and
principles for future software engineering contributions, such as the design of
artefact-oriented development processes and tools.
