Example: Reusable Asset
An example of a collection of one or more artifacts providing a solution to a problem.
Relationships
Related Elements
Main Description

Development-time repositories manage assets that are relevant to development roles, such as managers, analysts, architects, developers, and testers. This repository governs the assets as they are submitted, categorizes the assets, provides access control to the assets, and measures the activity level of assets in terms of their usage. An asset has several major characteristics, including:

  • A collection of one or more artifacts: files, binaries, models, tests, etc.
  • Relationships to other assets: dependencies, aggregation, etc. 
  • Classification: tagged values and terms to classify assets
  • Usage measurements: who is using the asset, what defects does it have, etc.
  • Access control: who can do what with the asset
  • Policies: descriptions of proper structure and content for the asset

Several major characteristics of an asset.

The asset is stored in the repository, where the asset metadata is stored in a database, and the asset content is placed in the file system or stored in a source control system. The asset may also be externalized and put into a .ras file. In short, the .ras file has a manifest.rmd file that contains the asset metadata. It also has the asset's content files. This file can be opened using file compression tools such as WinZip. See the sample asset file below. See also the OMG Reusable Asset Specification (http://www.omg.org) for further description regarding the structure of the .ras file.

asset.ras