Recently I came across with the term 'artifact' in related to maven build tool...
Can someone please explain what it's meant by 'artifact' in software industry and specifically in maven.
Maven organizes it's build in projects.
An artifact in maven is a resource generated by a maven project. Each maven project can have exactly one artifact like a jar, war, ear, etc.
The project's configuration file "pom.xml" describes how the artifact is build, how unit tests are run, etc.
Commonly a software project build with maven consists of many maven-projects that build artifacts (e.g. jars) that constitute the product.
E.g.
Root-Project // produces no artifact, simply triggers the build of the other projects
App-Project // The application, that uses the libraries
Lib1-Project // A project that creates a library (jar)
Lib2-Project // Another library
Doc-Project // A project that generates the user documentation from some resources
Maven artifacts are not limited to java resources. You can generate whatever resource you need. E.g. documentation, project-site, zip-archives, native-libraries, etc.