Class diagram in the context of Inheritance (object-oriented programming)

An artifact is one of many kinds of tangible by-products produced during the development of software. Some artifacts (e.g., use cases, class diagrams, requirements and design documents) help describe the function, architecture, and design of software. Other artifacts are concerned with the process of development itself—such as project plans, business cases, and risk assessments.

The term artifact in connection with software development is largely associated with specific development methods or processes e.g., Unified Process. This usage of the term may have originated with those methods.

In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the mechanism of basing an object or class upon another object (prototype-based inheritance) or class (class-based inheritance), retaining similar implementation. It is also defined as deriving new classes (sub classes) from existing ones such as super class or base class and then forming them into a hierarchy of classes. In most class-based object-oriented languages like C++, an object created through inheritance, a "child object", acquires all the properties and behaviors of the "parent object", with the exception of: constructors, destructors, overloaded operators and friend functions of the base class. Inheritance allows programmers to create classes that are built upon existing classes, to specify a new implementation while maintaining the same behaviors (realizing an interface), to reuse code and to independently extend original software via public classes and interfaces. The relationships of objects or classes through inheritance give rise to a directed acyclic graph.

An inherited class is called a subclass of its parent class or super class. The term inheritance is loosely used for both class-based and prototype-based programming, but in narrow use the term is reserved for class-based programming (one class inherits from another), with the corresponding technique in prototype-based programming being instead called delegation (one object delegates to another). Class-modifying inheritance patterns can be pre-defined according to simple network interface parameters such that inter-language compatibility is preserved.