A conceptual design-organizing approach that packages an entity’s functionality with other features. The term was (apparently) invented for Software development, but the description exactly corresponds to legacy System Engineering practices with regard to identification and population of Specifications, Drawings, and ICD’s to define CI’s.
Many software environments ascribe additional characteristics to this notion. For the most part, those appear to be marketing devices to differentiate the different environments from each other, and are of little use in general practice.
The term is also used to describe a particular approach to database design. As a database design concept, this notion has repeatedly proven useful to this author. See, for example, Shlaer and Mellor’s “Object Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World in Data” (1988, ISBN 0-13-629023-X).